CES: An Orgy Of Poison?

Another year, another electronics and gadgets conference that is out of whack with modern concerns around sustainability and the planet. The C.E.S. is an arrogant refusal to admit to the problems the electronics industry has created in terms of material waste, poisonous polution, energy waste and over-consumption.

Our man on the ground, Scott Burns, tells us that although some brands there might be talking about sustainability or at at least the advancement in technology in allowing devices to perform more with less power, the show itself is anything but green (aside from the mass transit and buses).

Ironically, CES says that it is reducing its own impact on the environment wherever it can – but it doesn’t seem to register that it’s actually contributing to a greater problem than the number of nonrecycled water bottles left over at the end of the show.

The fact is that the CES is another gory broadcast of all the products we don’t really need and that we’ll have to replace very soon. It’s fueled by the blogs like Engadget and magazines like Wired that hype the consumption of this plastic-metal and ignore any modern notions towards sustainability.

Wired sadly continues to talk double standards – their magazines praise 100mpg cars, their retail projects sell 21mpg cars and their coverage of the CES with 50+ posts, Wired fails to review the show with any eco-concern that can often be found in the pages of its magazine.

In the New York Times, this column by Brad Stone is just pointless geek masturbation to get eyeballs to the page – rather than what is needed: an engaging debate about why the hell C.E.S. is allowed to continue as it is without significant criticism of the companies who showcase there.

And as for Engadget… well, it’s always been a geek-porn site feeding the frenzy – maybe it’s time it had a conscience?

Can personal technology ever be sustainable? We asked the organizers of a Greener Gadgets conference that takes place in 2008 to comment on the industry and whether there really could be a green gadget. Marc Alt told PSFK:

The consumer electronics industry will never will be green, like any process and manufacturing industries. Ultimately, NOTHING newly manufactured in any industry IS green, there is always some environmental impact involved at some point in a product’s lifecycle, even if it is offset, reduced, ethically sourced, fair-traded, and green-e certified, etc. The good news is that many companies in the sector, both big and small, are beginning to turn their attention to the state of the planet.

At Greener Gadgets we will highlight promising developments in materials research, toxicity reduction and mitigation, take-back, recovery and recycling programs, reduced energy use, dematerialization (turning a product into a service), extended producer responsibility and other sustainability trends in the consumer electronics industry. We are excited that companies of the scale of Nokia and HP are focusing their attention on responsible recycling and take-back of their products, and that an increased attention to life-cycle and supply chain issues are coming to the forefront of design and engineering of consumer electronics.

We asked Jill Fehrenbacher, co-organizer of the Greener Gadgets conference and wife of the founder and editor of Engadget* why the electronics industry avoided the sustainability message. She said:

Yes, what you are saying is completely true and exactly the problem we are trying to tackle. The consumer electronics industry – with its toxic chemicals, conspicuous consumption and carefully planned obsolescence – is probably the least green industry on the planet. But there are certainly easy steps that can be taken to make things a bit greener: reducing energy consumption, eliminating toxic chemicals, designing products with longer lifecycles, and designing recycling and takeback into product lifecycles. This is why our conference is called ‘Greener Gadgets’ instead of ‘Green Gadgets’. Since so many companies are trying to use green as a marketing message these days, we wanted to investigate the real steps that companies are actually taking to try to improve the environmental impact of their products.

One of the problems we guess is that many electronics come from Asian countries and our first hand experience of working with them is that green and/or sustainability isn’t really on the radar there, despite what we hope. Until there’s a radical public shift in attitudes towards green in Asia, the companies there aren’t going to make many concessions to an American or European audience that might say they care but actually can’t keep their hands off the latest version of the next-big shiny toy.

(* sorry Jill/Peter, had to throw that one in – kinda ironic, no?)