That’s not ‘green,’ dammit!

That’s not ‘green,’ dammit!

Sticking an LED on a product doesn’t make it “green,” even if it is more energy efficient.

I was recently reading a speech by a senior executive at an e-company who extolled the use of more energy efficient LEDs in cell phones as a way to make them greener, while at the same time allowing them to take on more functionality and thereby increase their attractiveness to consumers. It must have been a low point in my biorhythms cycle, because I got hopping mad!

It’s true that LEDs are a much more energy efficient light source than other alternatives, as several of the articles in this issue make technically obvious. But sticking an LED on a product doesn’t make it “green,” even if it is more energy efficient. In the case envisioned by the e-executive, any gain in energy efficiency would be taken up by extra functionality, and so there is no net energy savings for the device.

Even if there were energy savings, if the new functionality caused people to give up their handhelds sooner, think what an ecological disaster that would be. By one estimate 426,000 cell phones are now being retired in the U.S. every day. Do we really want to accelerate that pace of retirement?

(I’d like to take a brief detour here to acknowledge the efforts of NextWorth (www.nextworth.com) to try to come to grips with this problem. The company accepts old iPods, iPhones, BlackBerry phones, digital cameras, GPS systems, video games, and video game consoles for online trade-in. Users can make money with old electronics and help promote reuse and recycling, and NextWorth hopes to profit too, so it looks like a classical win-win situation.)

Today there are products that are touted as “green” that I would never consider earth-friendly. Take, for example, the compact fluorescent light bulbs that are being pushed as an ecological improvement over incandescent bulbs. The problem here is that their mercury content makes it necessary to use special means to recycle them, something that isn’t being brought to the attention of purchasers in any store I’ve visited.

Maybe it’s unrealistic, but I wish that the use of the term “green” was restricted to those products that, over their cradle-to-beyond-the-grave lifetimes, provide a net reduction in the use of both energy and natural resources, and that never have a negative impact on the environment.

The fact is that “green” is being used more and more to label products in the same way that “organic” was once used without anyone to say whether the product really meets a specific set of criteria. It is becoming the newest term in the snake-oil salesman arsenal of pitch phrases, and the deception is not helping our planet any.

It’s time for industry to step in and start setting standards and labeling practices, before us common folk start to look for tar, feathers, and a suitable rail on which to ride offenders out of town.

Richard Comerford