By now most of you will have seen the Apple ad for their newest MacBook Pro. Sleek and thin aluminum casing and a great looking display with LED backlighting and enhanced color gamut. Normally, the next message would focus on increased performance, gigahertz and gigabytes. Wrong!!! Instead we hear the marketing people spreading the news about the greenest line of notebooks on the market.

Norbert Hildebrand
Insight Media Analyst

For Apple, a green notebook means low energy usage, a longer battery life, restriction of harmful chemicals, recycling programs and a re-designed environmentally friendly packaging (don’t worry it is still white). Apple even publishes an Environmental Report for their notebooks. According to the materials breakdown (shown on the left) even the pie-charting program has gone environmentally friendly and uses sustainable materials.

They fulfill Energy Star 5.0 and have an EPEAT Gold rating (for those who don’t know, EPEAT stands for ‘Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool’).

Each August, EISA (European Imaging and Sound Association) picks the best product in a wide range of product categories (cameras, BluRay players, TVs, audio equipment, and many more). It recently created a new category Greenest TV, with the current winner being JVC (model LT-42DS9), as shown in the photo. This unit offers a slim design, fulfills European RoHS regulations, offers easy disassembly for superb end-of-life management and has a smaller package allowing 50 more TVs in normal shipping container (yes, shipping counts too as it adds to the carbon footprint of the model).

You can’t buy this unit in the US, but many of these features creep into products available here. Making products slimmer to reduce shipping cost is a very real and wise business decision. In some countries ‘End of Life’ management is a responsibility of the original manufacturer. Since they are paying for recycling later on, making disassembly easier and therefore cheaper makes a lot of sense.

Many more ‘green’ technology trends are being discussed in the news every day. This includes political induced discussions about energy usage. A good example is the discussion in California to ban more energy hungry TVs from being sold there. This would hit mostly larger TVs as they are using more energy (see article in April issue of Large Display Report).

It is interesting to see that companies are using the ‘green’ trend as a marketing platform for their products. What started on a broader advertising scale only a year or two ago with the introduction of hybrid cars has spread to many other products. Who thought that Clorox would advertise a ‘Green Works’ product line, with chlorine being identified as environmentally harmful substance?

Some of these trends may lead to a marketing hype, while other programs like Energy Star and EPEAT are steering the industry in a more environmentally friendly direction. Eventually it will be up to us, the consumer, to buy green products and make this trend real and sustainable. What we will be seeing is the fast adoption of ‘green’ technologies that translate directly into the other green (as in dollar bills) for the manufacturers.

In this sense ‘Green’ will be the new black.

Insight Media will also host the first conference dedicated to understanding the green issues surrounding the display industry. Please join us July 9th in Washington, DC. www.greendisplayexpo.com