It's Not Easy Buying Green

It's easy enough to find paper towels, cosmetics, and cars that are good for the environment, but if you're looking to buy a green PC or cell phone, the task gets much harder.

It's not that the PC industry is at odds with Mother Nature. Many tech companies have been making big, public commitments to green products and processes--and not just around April's annual Earth Day event.

Dell's Plant a Tree For Me program lets you make a small donation to two environmental organizations while buying a notebook or desktop PC. Retailers like Radio Shack and Best Buy have electronics-recycling programs for disposing of unwanted cell phones, batteries, and other products. (The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has compiled a list of recycling programs.) But when it comes to buying a product that's less toxic to the environment, knowing what your options are isn't easy.

Typically, household products have simpler, easier-to-modify manufacturing processes than do PC products. "Figure out the flow of materials better, and then you can do a more environmentally friendly aluminum can," says Brad Allenby, professor of civil and environmental engineering and law at Arizona State University. "[A computer] is an extremely complex product even if you only look at the materials, and that makes it much, much more difficult."

The Challenge of Green

To make green products, a computer manufacturer must find reliable sources of an eco-friendly substances. "A big problem with postconsumer plastics is to be able to obtain a consistent quantity of plastic," says Mark Small, Sony's vice president for environmental safety and health. Sony is developing products that incorporate biodegradable plastics, and Small says that the company's LocationFree base stations use postconsumer plastic.

Of course, tech consumers don't like to sacrifice performance for any reason. In a highly unscientific PC World poll, 49 percent of 191 respondents said that they would buy green electronics equipment if doing so didn't entail to a sacrifice in performance.

That's a challenge for manufacturers when trying out new materials and designs.

"If we make a mistake or we move too fast, the performance benefits don't last as long as we want them to," says Small.