Issue #0719/3 - Can being the greenest technology company on the planet, producing the greenest PC on the planet turn Dell’s fortunes around.
Seemingly in a bid to raise ‘Dell awareness’, Michael Dell has launched a bid to get customers to help design the ‘greenest PC on the planet’; is calling on his suppliers to report greenhouse gas emissions data in their business reviews; and has declared his intention to make Dell the ‘greenest technology company on the planet’ by the launching of a zero carbon initiative including a ‘Plant a Tree for Me’ campaign in Europe.
Presumably we will see Dell itself reporting greenhouse gas emissions data – once the investigation into its own accounting practices are completed anyway. Now, everything Dell reports is ‘preliminary’.
New Energy Star requirements have set the scene for printers to become less expensive to run and therefore to be more environmentally friendly. Even these could be improved further by requiring the use of induction fusing technology so that fusers are ‘instant-on’ rather than needing costly heating elements that take time to heat up and must be held at printing temperature for lengthy periods of time.
Of course, patents get in the way here. A worldwide moratorium on patents affecting environmental issues would, perhaps, be as valuable as Mr Dell using his customer base as his R&D partners and gardeners.
Another angle on this might be – we should print more jobs in duplex to reduce the number of trees that have to be harvested and … demand more duplex-ready hardware from the manufacturers
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