For almost 15 years, removing halogenated substances from electronic products has been an ambition of  the TCO Certified program and other advocates of environmental and human health . Halogens such as brominated and chlorinated flame retardants are proven to pose substantial risks, both to the natural environment and also to the health of animals and humans. The challenge of eliminating these substances has been to work closely with industry partners to find viable alternatives that still maintain the safety features otherwise provided by halogenated content in the product.  This long term collaboration has now brought to market the first electronic products completely free from halogenated substances.

Halogenated substances have been used as an inexpensive and simple fire retardant in electronics, textiles and other everyday products for many years. They are also commonly used as a “plasticizer” in many products, giving the product a softer, pliable character. The environmental and health problems with halogen lie in its stability and persistence. It doesn’t break down when disposed of but is actually shown to remain in plants, animals and humans, for example in fat and breast milk. It has also been shown to adversely affect hormonal function, potentially causing fertility problems.

Voluntary third party certifications such as TCO Certified can help influence the progress of green design by recognizing front runners in industry who are successful in phasing out hazardous substances. But industry-wide adoption of these practices demands that legislation includes these good design practices by tightening existing legislation. The RoHS directive has been instrumental in brining about a reduction in the use of halogenated substances and other hazardous materials in electronics. However there are still many exclusions and exceptions to RoHS, which need to be tightened in order to realize a market where halogen-free electronics are the norm rather than the exception. 

TCO Certified continues to work closely with industry,  research and user communities  as well as environmental experts and legislators to ensure ongoing  progress in the  development of ICT products that are designed for the environment and usability.

No one knows what effect these chemicals have on us, on animals or the environment – especially not in this complicated mix, the “cocktail” of chemicals we are exposed to today. The Swedish film-maker Stefan Jarl recently made a documentary Submission – in defence of the unborn, featuring 23 professors from around the world. In the documentary Jarl seeks to find out just what problems these chemicals can cause, and the lingering effects they can have on unborn children. Have a look at a trailer for this interesting movie here  (the trailer is in English).

IT equipment contains plenty of different hazardous metals, chemicals and materials. Legislation has prohibited a few (the EU RoHS directive for instance) but there is so much more that needs to be done. Tonnes of E-waste are being burned in backyards in China or Africa, polluting both the environment and us – these chemicals are both persistent and bio-accumulative and travel far. One group of substances causing a lot of concerns is the halogenated, specifically the brominated and chlorinated. When the E-waste is burned under insufficient conditions – as a lot of the millions of tonnes of E-waste are today – hazardous dioxins, furans and other chemicals are released. These are then transferred to our food, water and finally, to us.

So what should we do? We can obviously not wait for our legislators to prohibit all potentially harmful substances. When it comes to IT equipment and the chemicals they contain there are several things we can do ourselves.

1. Buy eco labelled products! The TCO certification program prohibited brominated and chlorinated substances and materials and hazardous metals in the certified products 1995 – over 10 years before the European RoHS directive. And we have continuously added and toughened the requirements since then. 
2. Use your vacuum cleaner at home. A lot. It reduces the amount of brominated flame retardants, phthalates and other harmful substances flying around in your home.
3.  Have plenty of green plants at home. They also purify indoor air from harmful chemicals.
4. Leave your old electronics and all other hazardous waste for recycling – it reduces the amount of hazardous chemicals in the community in the long run.

China is preparing to issue a new packaging legislation which takes a life-cycle cradle-to-cradle approach. The suggested legislation will not only ban packaging which is neither reusable, recyclable nor biodegradable, it will also ban PVC and the use of certain materials, ink and dye solvents. The new legislation will also require postconsumer household waste sorting, establish waste collection systems, and the nationwide construction of Eco-Zones, Special Industrial Zones for recycling and reprocessing plants. To be imposed nationwide this packaging legislation is more comprehensive than that of the EU, Germany and Japan. They also plan on stiff penalties for those who do not comply.

As China is the world’s largest packaging producing market and the packaging sector in China is growing by 36% annually, let us all hope it goes as planned. The implications for all players in the Global Packaging Supply Chain are tremendous.

This is crazy! And what is even scarier is that people usually leaves these chargers in the power outlets, not realizing that they are vampire load, sucking electricity even when there is no device attached to be charged. And for a “normal” family with a few children, this means quite a lot of chargers just sitting there, consuming.

In the U.S. there are more than 1.5 Billion of these adapters in use, with a billion new ones shipped every year. The average American home has five to ten of these components powering devices in their homes. The U.S. EPA estimates 11% of all electricity used passes through adapters, and 30-50% of power is lost in conversion.

But things are happening. I am pleased that the mobile industry has decided to develop a universal mobile phone charger (using the Micro-USB technology as the common charging interface) – this will save energy as well as make our lives easier (I’ve spent years looking for the right charger and kicking myself every time I forgot my charger while travelling). Also, both the EU directive on the eco-design of Energy-using Products (EuP) and the US EPA have developed regulations governing both efficiency and stand-by mode of AC/DC power adapters.

But until all of this is in place – please remember to unplug all your power adapters when you’re not using them!

Another way to influence the industry is by asking for sustainable products when buying new ones. As a consumer this might be quite a difficult task (although it will become easier as more and more displays, projectors and computers are TCO certified). But for example public procurers can, just by thinking about what they buy, have great influence. Why should our tax money go towards buying non-environmental products possibly produced by underpaid workers in poor working conditions?

Last week I was at a round table meeting in Prague organized by the project ProcureITfair (www.procureitfair.org). They try, by information, campaigns and good examples, to influence public procurers in Europe to use their buying power and ask for IT-products that have been produced under fair conditions. We’re happy to be able to say that one step in the right direction is by asking for TCO certified products.

1. The power used turning my PC on negates any benefits of turning it off.                                                   

2.  I use a screen saver – that saves me energy.

3. Turning my PC on and off will reduce its performance and useful life.

4. I need to run updates and patches – I can’t do that in lower-power states.

5. My PC users will not tolerate any downtime for power management.

Of course, none of these myths are true (except possibly no.5, but that problem is possible to overcome). I found this great blog where these five myths are debunked (based on the Forrester report), have a look at  http://www.infoworld.com/d/green-it/five-pc-power-myths-debunked-888 

Help us to spread the word!

After reading the new report “The environmental benefits of recycling” from the Imperial Collage in London/BIR, it is apparent that if we all started to recycle more, enormous amounts of energy could be saved. The report identifies the savings that can be made by using recyclables as opposed to virgin material and considers seven metals – aluminium, copper, ferrous metals, lead, nickel, tin and zinc – and paper. The results are astonishing.  For lead , tin and aluminium, for instance, the energy savings of using recycled material are between 95-99% (and these processes are energy consuming, believe me). They find that the potential of savings in annual CO2-emissions on a global level to be 501 million tonnes CO2, just for these seven metals. And they haven’t even taken the energy consumption of mining or transportation to the production plant into consideration.

To take it to a more understandable level, if everybody in Sweden ( about 9 million people) just sent a few more metal containers to recycling, increasing recycling by just 5-10%, we could avoid 685 000 tonnes of CO2-emissions. That equals the annual emissions of 274 000 cars – just by enabling the materials to be used more than once.

As a global environmental and usability label for ICT equipment, the TCO label tries to use the influence we have on the IT-industry to affect the design and production towards more sustainable products. Waste and recycling are one of the areas we are focusing on and the numbers above clearly shows why.
 
Fortunately, there are so many creative and innovative people among us with amazing ideas.
I attended a seminar organized by the recycling industries in Sweden yesterday, and got the opportunity to listen to a few of them. One example is Petra and Jenny at Apocalypse (www.apocalypselab.net) developing new, sustainable products from recycled material “material with a history”. For instance their main product “The Soap”, a soap made out of used and recycled deep frying oil from falafel kitchens in the south of Sweden. Sounds strange but apparently it doesn’t even need perfume. Such a great idea! Or Houdini Sportswear (www.houdinisportswear.com/en), producing cool sports garments out of recycled (and recyclable!) polyester.

So let us remain positive that we will be able to save the world. As Karl Marx once said; “Mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve”.