Dell releases latest green tech report card

Dell has published its latest corporate responsibility report today. While I know you may be interested in what the company is doing from an operations standpoint to improve its stance toward the environment, what you really care about from a green-tech perspective is how the company is redesigning its products. So here are some of its latest achievements, as well as what you can expect in the months/years to come.

So far ...

• All current laptop displays now use LEDs, which eliminates mercury.
• More than 7.2 million pounds of the plastics in Dell's OptiPlex systems and monitors came from post-consumer recycled plastics. (That translates into roughly 263 million water bottles.
• In fiscal year 2010, Dell has more than 135 products listed in the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) database.

What you can expect ...

• An effort to make laptop and desktop products up to 25 percent more energy-efficient by the end of 2010, compared with 2008
• A focus on the ability of server-managed power management to cut up to 40,000 in carbon dioxide emissions for Dell customers between fiscal year 2009 and fiscal year 2012
• A re-energized initiative to cut brominated flame retardants (BFRs), polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics and chlorinated flame retardants from all new Dell personal computing products by 2011. That's a reset goal, and the company is leaving itself room for error. The report states: "Achieving this goal is contingent on when the industry identifies acceptable alternatives that will lower product health and environmental impacts without compromising product performance."
• The proactive phaseout of materials that will be targeted in the next update of the restriction on hazardous substances (RoHS): hexabromocyclododecane, bis(2-ethylhexyl)phthalate, butyl benzyl phthalate and dibutyl phthalate.