Purchasing New Computer Equipment

If your business (or you personally) is in need of upgrading and expanding your computers, I recommend checking EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) from the Green Electronics Council. I recently was in the market to buy a new laptop and wanted to get the most environmentally benign (let's face it, electronics are far from "environmentally-friendly") laptop I could reasonably afford. Over a couple of days searching the Internet, the best resource I found was EPEAT. What is good about the site is that you can search for various specifications that you are looking for, not just environmental impact, but things like screen size too.

The program rates equipment on "23 required criteria and 28 optional criteria" and groups them into Gold, Silver and Bronze ratings. All three ratings include meeting all required criteria. The optional criteria is used for differentiating Gold, Silver and Bronze. The categories of criteria are broad and include things like elimination/reduction of sensitive material, packaging, end of life, corporate responsibility, packaging and Energy Star. (The information seems to be submitted by the manufacturers.)

What I decided to do was look through all the laptops reported to have no environmentally sensitive materials (lead, cadmium, mercury, etc.) using the search by optional criteria. I also wanted a decent size laptop - 15" or greater. There weren't a lot of options. One was MacBook Pro, which are quite pricey. There were some Dell, Sony and Lenovo that were there mainly due to having an LED backlit screen. I settled on a Asus N50V. I'm quite happy with it.