Buying Greener Electronics with EPEAT

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Buying Greener Electronics with EPEATby Editor on October 11, 2010

Sarah O'Brien of EPEAT shares the results of EPEAT's 2009 environmental benefits reporting.

My job is to help business purchasers and consumers use the EPEAT  “green IT” ratings system to select more environmentally sustainable electronic products.  They’ve been doing so in growing numbers around the world since EPEAT’s launch in 2006 – and last year the trend continued, with more business purchasers and individual consumers using EPEAT to choose greener, more sustainable products. 

More manufacturers are participating as well.  EPEAT started 2009 with 30 manufacturers registering 975 products, and ended the year with 37 manufacturers registering more than 1400 products in the US and many more internationally. Currently (September 2010), more than 50 manufacturers register more than 2500 unique products in the 41 countries EPEAT covers.

That progress is great, but it’s the results, in terms of the environmental improvement motivated by that purchasing, that matters.  So I was thrilled to finish calculating the environmental benefits related to EPEAT purchasing in 2009 for our annual benefits reporting[1]:

EPEAT registered notebooks, desktops, and monitors purchased worldwide in 2009 will, over their life, compared to the purchase of products not meeting system criteria:

Reduce use of toxic materials, including mercury, by 1537 metric tons, equivalent to the weight of nearly 800,000 bricks Eliminate use of enough mercury to fill 372,000 average household fever thermometers Eliminate over 29,000 met­ric tons of solid waste, equivalent to more than 14,500 U.S. households’ annual solid waste generationReduce hazardous waste disposal by 72,000 metric tons

In addition, because EPEAT requires registered products to meet the latest ENERGY STAR® specifications, these products will consume less energy throughout their useful life than nonqualified products, resulting in:

Savings of over 10 billion kWh of electricity — enough to power 900,000 U.S. homes for a year  Reduction of over 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions — equivalent to taking nearly 1.4 million U.S. passenger cars off the road for a year Avoidance of 44 million metric tons of air emissions (including greenhouse gas emissions) and over 93,000 metric tons of water pollutant emissions

As a nonprofit organization, EPEAT’s mission is to advance environmental improvement, so all our marketing activities around EPEAT are aimed at creating change for the better. This level of benefits confirms EPEAT ‘s effectiveness at channeling purchaser demand toward products with reduced impact on the planet. 

By choosing EPEAT rated products (preferably those rated at the Silver or Gold which demonstrate really major improvements in product design and delivery) , consumers can reward manufacturers for the vitally important work of creating and supporting greener products. We’re grateful to Amazon for making EPEAT information available, and encourage you to use it to send a clear message to manufacturers of support for greener product choices when you buy your next IT equipment!

To learn more, you can download the Executive Summary of the 2009 Environmental Benefits report at www.epeat.net/docs/EPEATEBReport2009ExecSumm.pdf , find out much more about EPEAT at www.epeat.net , or view a recent  online discussion forum on green electronics set up by The World radio show at http://www.world-science.org/forum/green-electronics-epeat-united-pepper/  .  

EPEAT’s approach to environmental assessment — rating based on public standards, tiered rankings that encourage competition and continuous improvement, ongoing independent verification, and easy access to a single registry to compare and select among qualified products — continues to engage dozens of manufacturers of all sizes and differing nationalities, and thousands of purchasers worldwide in the process of creating and rewarding more sustainable products.  We hope you’ll participate and keep the momentum going!

 

We'd like to congratulate EPEAT on their accomplishments and thank Sarah O'Brien for this post! Check out Amazon's Green Electronics Store for more EPEAT qualified products.

-Amazon Green

[1] Because EPEAT’s underlying standard (IEEE 1680.1) was designed to reduce duplicative effort, some of EPEAT’s environmental criteria align with other requirements, such as ENERGY STAR® specifications and the EU’s RoHS regulations. Thus not all the changes in product design and delivery that qualify products for EPEAT registration result from EPEAT alone. However, each EPEAT registered product purchased results in environmental impact benefits specific to the products purchased – those are the benefits measured in this annual report.

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