As energy costs rise, PC makers need to develop environmentally friendly, power-saving products, writes John Collins

The modern PC may have only celebrated its 25th birthday this summer, but it is estimated that almost a billion PCs have been produced in that time. Given the pace of technological change, it's a conservative estimate that at least half of those computers are no longer in use. But what happens to those machines after they reach the end of their useful life?

According to Richard Barrington, head of public policy with Sun Microsystems in Britain and Ireland, just 2-3 per cent of PCs are properly recycled.

That means close to half a billion PCs have been sent to landfill or been incinerated.

Until the EU's Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) directive came into effect last July, PCs contained a variety of dangerous substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and polybrominated biphenyl ethers (PBDE). If dumped in landfills, these substances can contaminate ground water and, if burned, the toxins may have been released into the environment.

PC manufacturing is also a highly intensive and far from efficient process. Barrington claims that producing an average car requires twice its finished weight in raw materials - producing a PC consumes a staggering 28 times the weight of the finished product.

Given that the computer and consumer electronics industries are such massive consumers of energy and producers of waste, it is no surprise that they have attracted the attention of environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

It claims that, in addition to the electronic devices that are sent to landfills or burned each year, thousands more are exported, often illegally, from western industrialised countries to Asia for disassembly. As a result, low-paid workers at scrapyards, some of whom are children, are exposed to a cocktail of toxic chemicals and poisons.

Last month, Greenpeace introduced A Guide to Greener Electronics, which tracks the efforts of electronics companies to become more environmentally friendly. Nokia and Dell top the table as the greenest companies both scoring seven out of 10, while Lenovo, the Chinese PC maker that took over IBM's PC division last year, and mobile-phone maker Motorola prop it up with scores of 1.3 and 1.7.

Surprisingly, Apple, which is often perceived as a caring and progressive organisation, scored just 2.7 and was only praised for the amount of its products it recycles.

Other criteria that Greenpeace judged on included chemicals management, timelines for PVC and BFR phase-out, and providing information to customers on how to recycle.

However, some industry insiders have criticised the league table, claiming that it is based on intentions and company announcements rather than actions already taken.

While tech companies may be making the right noises about the environment, it is clear that rising energy costs are also one of the main reasons they are being spurred into action.

According to Barrington, recent research suggests that IT has hit a period of peak energy prices.

In plain English, that means that the cost of powering the current computers in use is more than is being spent on new technology. He says that as a result, for the majority of technology companies, their second biggest expense after people is their energy bill.

The current trend towards big data centres where large amounts of servers are centrally housed in high-end facilities is also adding to the problem.

Barrington says that two to three times the power of a server is needed just for air conditioning to keep it cool in a facility that typically houses thousands of other servers.

At its annual technology day in New York recently, troubled computer maker Dell focused on the fact that it was introducing an energy-saving product strategy. It claims its new OptiPlex 745 high-end workstation has power savings of about 40 per cent over models based on previous generations of Intel chips, while its recently launched ninth-generation PowerEdge servers provide gains of up to 196 per cent in performance per watt.

The company's chief executive, Kevin Rollins, said Dell was ramping up its recycling efforts and partnering charities to provide them with old PCs, in an effort to ensure "no computer should go to waste".

"Dell is committed to providing our customers' products with the most performance per watt," said Rollins. "Our energy-efficient products help customers lower cost of ownership and help meet the broader goal of protecting the environment. It's critical that our entire industry address this important issue."

Sun is advocating an even more radical approach. Barrington says that, increasingly, applications like spreadsheets and calendars are available online, as are services such as storage, all of which were traditionally provided locally on a PC.

"If you look at most people's daily routine, you don't actually need all the complexity of a PC, you just need a network access device," says Barrington. "It's just about the services on the network and not the resources I own."

He points out that Sun sells network access terminals for less than €200 and because they have fewer components that can become obsolete, they have a potential life span of 20 years, compared to the three years that most corporate PCs are used for before being junked.

To support such a strategy, Sun is working with chipmaker AMD on creating highly efficient servers that can support networks of these machines.

While Sun has always trumpeted its environmental track record, it is not doing so entirely out of a love for the planet. This model of moving the intelligence to the centre of the network is something it has been touting since the mid-1990s with the introduction of its ill-fated Network Computer.

That machine was ahead of its time - broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now, which makes the use of such "dumb terminals" a possibility in a range of settings, not just when working within the confines of the office.

One thing is clear: with energy costs continuing to head upwards, customers are increasingly likely to place pressure on the tech industry to come up with more efficient models.