Dell – Carbon Neutrality
About a month ago Dell announced with great fan-fare that they were the first computer company that offered their customers the chance to be carbon neutral, by planting trees to offset the carbon dioxide generated in producing a years worth of electricity for the computer. Nice idea.
They’re lucky that they specifically didn’t mention packaging, and saving the forests. I was down in Hamilton today for work, and a box from Dell arrived with two sticks of RAM for a new Dell server. We’re talking standard 1GB ECC sticks of ram. The packaging for these two unremarkable sticks of memory amounted to no less than seven boxes of increasing size (think japanese dolls), 8 peices of packaging foam, and one long strip of “air bubbles”. Two of the boxes contained absolutely nothing except for packaging foam, and were just used to pad out the medium size boxes, so that the boxes containing the actual ram didn’t bounce around. The two sticks could easily have fit in just one of the smaller boxes! The waste is unbelievable, see the picture below with your own eyes.
With the number of trees that died to support this packaging effort, I sure hope that the $6 I pay to make my desktop carbon neutral plants a lot more trees than is strictly necessary!
O_o
No comment.
Comment by Sam — February 14, 2007 @ 9:45 pm
Trees planted today will absorb carbon dioxide over a rather longer period than the lifetime of the computer whose fossil fuel needs they are supposed to balance out. So in the medium term – which is critical to mitigating climate change – they fail to achieve carbon neutrality.
Comment by Ben Hutchings — February 14, 2007 @ 10:17 pm
News flash: There are such things as man-made “tree farms” where trees are specificly grown for the purpose of being cut down and used in paper products such as packaging. As in, we’re not really ‘losing’ any forests because of Dell’s packaging standards.
Comment by AlexMax — February 14, 2007 @ 10:40 pm
Those dolls are called Matryoskas and are in fact Russian.
Comment by asd — February 15, 2007 @ 4:23 am
Haha, the ram would be fine with only 1/16th of all that packing & foam etc.
Comment by rohb — February 17, 2007 @ 4:39 pm
Hi I work on environment issues at Dell and just saw your post. That amount of packaging is definitely not standard practice, in fact we are working to minimize our use of packaging as much as possible. I have forwarded this to our packaging team to see if we can find out what went wrong. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. If anyone has other questions about Dell’s environment programs would be happy to answer those. Thanks, Bryant
Comment by Bryant at Dell — February 23, 2007 @ 6:00 am
[...] the amount of packaging some of our purchases have arrived in. I think Matt Brown’s recent experience with Dell must be some kind of record [...]
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