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By Root 1020 0

in older models, often contains lead, the lights behind the flat-panel display often contain mercury—and the housing, which is composed of various petroleum-based plastics treated with flame retardants and other chemicals for color and texture. Noxious PVC, which I’ll describe in more depth in an upcoming section, insulates the wires. The lithium batteries usually used to power laptops contain some toxic substances—for example, the lithium itself. These hundreds of materials, many of them hazardous, are all enmeshed and entwined, which is why recycling the components and materials from my laptop later, after its eventual disposal, will be such a hassle.

Source: Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition/Electronics Take Back Campaign, 2008.

My laptop—the one on which I’m writing this book—was made by Dell. In 2006, when I was in the market for a new computer, I chose it because of Dell’s high ranking in Greenpeace’s regularly-updated Guide to Green Electronics, which rates electronics manufacturers on three areas: toxic chemicals, recycling, and climate change/energy consumption. Since 2006 Dell has dropped to a much lower ranking due to its backtracking on a commitment to eliminate toxic PVC and brominated flame retardants by 2010.

There’s also some upsetting news in terms of worker safety at Dell. Their company policies discuss their commitment to ensuring safe working conditions, both at their own factories and for contractors that produce materials for Dell computers. Unfortunately, a number of investigations by labor and human rights organizations have found ongoing labor violations at factories producing for Dell. The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), a nonprofit Dutch research and advisory bureau, investigated eight Dell suppliers in China, Mexico, the Philippines, and Thailand. SOMO uncovered “violations including dangerous working conditions, degrading and abusive working conditions, excessive working hours and forced overtime, illegally low wages and unpaid overtime, denial of the right to strike, discrimination in employment, use of contract labor and ‘trainees,’ workers without a contract, and lack of freedom of association and unionization.”73

Uh-oh. Greenpeace’s guide doesn’t investigate working conditions. And who but a materials geek like me has time to do all this research and cross-referencing? Luckily, my colleague Dara O’Rourke, professor of environment and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is creating an online tool called the GoodGuide, which provides wide-ranging information on the environmental, social, and health impacts of many thousands of consumer products all in one place. GoodGuide’s section on electronics hasn’t been launched as I write this (and O’Rourke’s team is fighting against the same corporate firewalls I faced in researching my laptop).74

I don’t want to portray Dell and other electronics manufacturers as totally resistant to change, though. They are attempting to lighten their environmental footprint by eliminating some environmentally sensitive materials like mercury, PVC and some toxic flame retardants; by increasing the percentage of renewable energy used to run their facilities; and by reducing packaging and increasing the recycled content of packaging.75 I applaud these efforts, but I’m afraid they just don’t go far enough.

It seems ludicrous that electronics can’t be made differently. Electronics designers and producers are smart people—it’s mind-blowing how fast they come up with improvements in speed, size, and capacity. The oft-quoted Moore’s law predicts that computing capacities can be doubled approximately every two years. So these guys can figure out how to fit thousands of songs on a device the size of a matchbook, but they can’t eliminate the most toxic plastic—PVC—from their high-tech wonders or reduce packaging waste by more than 10 percent? Please! These brainiacs should be able to figure out how to phase out toxics, reduce waste to a minimum, and expand the durability and life span of their products too.

Environmental health