Green Manufacturing of Green Computers

Green Manufacturing

RoHS / WEEE Directives

The RoHS Directive , an EU directive aimed at reducing the use of hazardous materials, is now a central concern for electrical and electronic manufacturers. This directive from the European Union restricts the use of certain hazardous substances like lead and mercury in electrical and electronic equipment. This is to say it reduces the allowable content of these substances in computer components to substantially safer amounts. This program has been adopted globally under the RoHS name, and sometimes under new program names in various regions.

Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) who purchase electronic components such as motherboards to incorporate into their own solution-level products now insist on RoHS compliance. Suffice it to say, RoHS is a successful program.

Products must be certified to claim RoHS compliance. However, there is no official RoHS label as with Energy Star. To get around this, manufactures of computer boards design and place their own RoHS compliance labels on their certified products. Hence, there is a variety of RoHS labels.

Companies that comply with RoHS in their manufacturing restrict the use of Lead (Pb), Cadmium (Cd), Mercury (Hg), Hexavalent chromium (Cr6+), Polybrominated biphenyls (PBB) and Polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDE) in their products. RoHS has become a business pre-requisite in the electronics industry in most instances.

Another program closely related to RoHS that also issued from the European Union is the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive (WEEE) of 2002. This directive sets collection, recycling and recovery targets for electrical components and devices. The goal is to address the burgeoning amounts of toxic e-waste caused by the appliances, computer, and consumer electronics markets.

A More Efficient Globe

Central to all embedded products is the microprocessor; and there are also favorable trends here. The trend toward thinner trace lines on processors shows how technology can favor greener solutions. Given an equal elegance in their designs, electrons require less energy and generate less heat navigating the newer and smaller microprocessors. Less energy and longer battery life are obvious benefits. However, less heat production is significant because devices powered by these newer processors require less energy for cooling both within and outside of their enclosures. In rooms with racks and racks of servers, cooling requirements can be immense causing a great deal of energy to be wasted.

There are other favorable results from miniaturization. There is a trend to integrate previously separate components. Virtualization, imaging, security, I/O, and other functions that used to be handled by separate chips on the motherboard are increasingly integrated on the central processing unit (CPU). Thinner trace lines and smaller transistors have resulted in smaller CPUs that yield the same or greater performance as the older, larger solutions. More powerful solutions now require less real estate.

This CPU miniaturization enables smaller motherboards, computing modules, and enclosed devices. These devices are more energy efficient than solutions without this level of integration. This is a trend that shows no sign of slowing down and has already blurred the line between consumer electronics and computers. Hard-core scientific research is yielding energy-friendly consumer electronic and computer devices.

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