Bury that Cinema Display, boil that MacBook

Posted by Dennis Sellers Aug 23, 2007 at 1:22am

Would you like a cornstarch-based Mac? Who knows, but one might be in your future. Fujitsu has released a laptop with a biodegradable chassis, which may offer a glimpse to what’s eventually coming down the pike.

According to a report at ZDNet UK, the Fujitsu LifeBook sports a chassis made from a plastic made from cornstarch, rather than petroleum. When it’s disposed of, the chassis will purportedly decompose in a matter of months, as opposed to decades for standard plastic. Cornstarch-based plastic results in 15 percent less carbon emissions, experts say.

The LifeBook is currently available only in Japan, but it is likely that similar products will start to appear in the US and Europe, according to ZDNet UK. The cost of bio-plastic is expected to decline as companies such as Cereplast and agricultural firm Archer Daniels Midland expand their production.

Fujitsu’s LifeBook is just one example of what may be a future trend. Last year MicroPro—a company based in Dublin, Ireland that produces eco-friendly computers, keyboards, mice and flat-panel monitors—announced what it says is the world’s first biodegradable computer components.

According to About My Planet, MicroPro’s “iameco” products have a life span of 7-10 years, up to three times the lifespan of an average computer. Computers made of iameco parts are purportedly a third smaller than average computers on the market, requiring less energy to manufacture.

They require less energy to run as well; 35W in normal mode, whereas other computers use 300W, and 4W in standby mode. Many of MicroPro’s keyboards, mice and monitors have a wood-based frame and are made from the waste product of the pulp industry in Europe. Other components are made of wood harvested from sustainable sources: beech from Germany, ash from the USA, and dark wood from East Africa. You can bury them in the ground and they will go back into the soil within three years and the use of reusable materials and recyclable packing results in a zero waste product, according to MicroPro Managing Director Paul Maher.

He says you could, for example, buy a new computer display and bury your old one in the back yard or garden. Three years later the monitor will have biodegraded.

There’s also talk of computer parts that could be “boiled away.” An “IdeaStorm” blog at the Dell site offers this scenario: “It would be great if a computer was made of mostly biodegradable components. Imagine when your done with your old computer, you could remove the power supply and hard drive and CD drive, and then drop the rest of it into a tub of boiling hot water.

”The Circuit Boards would melt away, a harmless starch based polymer that bacteria can eat. The chips, resistors, and sockets would sink to the bottom of the tub. The actual wiring would no longer use Copper or Gold, but the conductive plastic polymer recently developed – works as good as metal, but it’s plastic! So you get left with some starchy water, wet chips and electronics, and some stringy plastic strings.”

While it’s hard to imagine burying a Cinema Display or boiling a MacBook, the issue of e-waste is a problem that has to be addressed. A study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows that e-waste makes up about one to two percent of the municipal solid waste stream in the U.S. According to research in Europe, e-waste is growing at three times the rate of other municipal waste. Between 1997 and 2007, an estimated 500 million computers will have become obsolete. In addition, as we transition from analog to digital television, we can expect millions of television sets to be replaced with new DTV models.

One hundred percent biodegradable Macs (or Dells or HPS or whatever) aren’t going to hit the market any time soon. But electronic and computer parts that are biodegraded or recycled will certainly loom large in the months and years ahead.

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