IN DEPTH Green PCs

The world’s biggest PC maker says it can achieve net zero by 2050. Barry Collins visits its US headquarters to get his hands on plant-based PCs, bamboo packaging and vegan leatherstyle covers.

CREDIT: Namthip Muanthongthae/Getty Images

It’s not easy being green, as a wise young frog once sang. It’s definitely not easy if you’re a global PC manufacturer in an industry where the trend has emphatically swung towards sealed, largely unrepairable devices over the past decade. How far can a company such as Lenovo swing the pendulum back? That’s what we were invited to the company’s US headquarters in North Carolina to find out. And before you point out the irony of flying around the globe to cover green issues, personal flight CO2 pales in comparison to the footprint of manufacturing. There we saw how Lenovo was making greater use of recycled materials, manufacturing laptop cases from flax, packaging from bamboo, computers that are designed to last longer, and servers cooled with water instead of energy-hungry air conditioning. They’re all part of its goal to become net zero by 2050, with some stiff targets to meet in the much shorter term, too.

Can a top-tier PC maker shifting tens of millions of PCs every year really make zero contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions within 30 years? Nobody can know for sure, but there’s zero doubt that the company is at least taking steps in the right direction.

Recycled PC cases

Lenovo sells an awful lot of PCs – almost 69 million of them (some of them even run Linux!) in 2022, according to research firm Gartner, making it the biggest box-shifter in the world by quite a margin. It accounts for just under a quarter of global PC www.linuxformat.com shipments, so can have a sizeable impact on resources if it can make better use of recycled materials and create less waste. Not least because, as market leader, it can set an example for others to follow.

Left: ThinkPad packaging will be 100% plastic-free by the end of 2023.

Right: Modular laptops are popular with customers, but barriers persist.

CREDIT: Lenovo

There’s upward pressure on the company to do less damage to the environment, too. “Every customer I speak to says, ‘Do you have a target for driving zero carbon emissions?’” says Tom Butler, the company’s executive director of commercial portfolio and product management (Lenovo could make serious environmental savings on business card printing by cutting the length of its job titles).

One of the ways Lenovo is reducing waste is with the increased use of natural or recycled materials for PC and laptop cases. We’re taken to Lenovo’s design lab, where we’re surrounded by laptop case designs, stretching back to the beige IBM-branded laptops of the ’80s through to prototypes of unreleased devices that are annoyingly hidden beneath a thick black sheet.