What makes a laptop a green laptop?
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A laptop has to fulfill multiple requirements to be considered a “green laptop”.
Its power consumption during usage is only one in a series of qualifications which affect the whole life cycle, from design and manufacturing to usage and disposal – in a word: it has to be sustainable.
Greenpeace, an independent non-governmental organisation for the protection and conservation of the environment, has ranked the Toshiba Portégé R600 as No. 1 in the notebook category of its “Green electronics Survey 2008”.
The excellent ranking of a Toshiba laptop is a result of Toshiba’s permanent commitment to designing sustainable devices.
Toshiba says that designing a sustainable laptop is a very complex process spanning from product design, procurement, choice of state-of-the art components, and manufacturing through to efficient power consumption and ensuring a long product lifetime.
As such, to summarise what makes a Toshiba laptop a sustainable laptop.
Design and procurement: The first step towards Green IT
Toshiba laptops are designed with sustainability in mind, beginning with a resource saving product design. This includes developing lighter and more robust products with long service lifetimes, lowering power consumption, avoiding hazardous materials, and minimising material consumption right from the start.
The selection of sustainable materials is the next step in a laptop’s green life.
Toshiba Group has established the Green Procurement Guidelines, in accordance with the Regulations to Implement Green Procurement, while it has also been advocating green procurement worldwide in cooperation with its suppliers.
Toshiba has already put the ‘precautionary principle’ and ‘substitution principle’ into practice and replaces hazardous substances with alternatives, whether those hazardous substances are restricted by the law or not.
Long before the RoHS1 Directive came into effect in the European Union, Toshiba adopted a policy of not using these restricted substances in products and furthermore has abolished the use of 15 substance groups, including ozone-depleting materials.
These efforts were explicitly honoured by Greenpeace in its “Green Electronics Survey 2008”: “Toshiba is ahead of everyone else when it comes to the elimination of toxic chemicals”, states Greenpeace.
Manufacturing and logistics: Less is more
As well as the quality and harmlessness of applied materials, their quantity also plays an important role.
Toshiba laptops are manufactured with as little material as possible. Cutting edge technologies like high density and small sized printed circuit boards or light and durable cases make the devices lightweight and minimise material inventory.
Extra thin glass for the displays and the bezels made of low specific weight material are further examples of minimising weight.
Mass reduction of products and packaging is the most efficient way to reduce the environmental impact of transport and logistics because the transportation of lighter devices requires less fuel and therefore cuts the emission of greenhouse gas.
To reduce the amount of waste during manufacturing Toshiba makes great efforts to recover and recycle. Silver, copper, tin and similar raw materials contained in printed circuit boards and in any electronic component waste generated during the manufacturing process are recycled immediately.
Life Cycle: Durability for a long-lasting usage
Around 75 percent of the CO2 emitted during a Toshiba laptop’s lifecycle is
accounted for during the manufacturing process and as such, Toshiba is focused on creating a long life cycle for its products.
These efforts match customers’ needs: 69 percent of Europeans want to use their laptops at least for three years.
Laptops are exposed to high levels of mechanical strain during usage and so Toshiba ensures its mobile devices are made of high-class materials to resist heavy stress and mechanical shocks.
The cases, made of magnesium alloy or high quality plastic, make the laptop robust; motherboards positioned far away from the edges minimise the effects of mechanical shocks.
Spill proof keyboards protect the laptop from system damage caused by accidental spills. The availability of spare parts - for a minimum of five years after the end of production - also prolongs the lifetime of laptops.
In the 2008 annual computing survey by British independent consumer organisation, The Which magazine, Toshiba ranked no. 1 in overall product reliability.
Power consumption: Innovative technologies lower energy consumption.
The amount of CO2 emitted during usage of a laptop is directly proportional to its energy consumption – the less power a laptop consumes, the more eco-friendly it is.
With the help of cutting edge technologies Toshiba integrates many energy efficient components into its laptops.
Power-saving Eco Utility from Toshiba
To run the laptop economically, users can regulate the laptop settings with our new software application – the Eco Utility.
It allows users to easily switch on an ‘eco mode’ - a power saving configuration of the laptop. When running in eco mode the display brightness is automatically dimmed and the illumination LED5 and backlight of the keyboard is switched off.
In addition, the eco power plan reduces timer settings for sleep mode of the hard disk drive (HDD), of the display and of the system shutdown.
The Toshiba Eco Utility shows power consumption in approximate real-time, the long-time accumulated power consumption and current settings.
