GREEN PCs

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

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 in the other direction? That’s what I was invited to the company’s US headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina to find out. (No, the irony of flying thousands of miles to find out how a company plans to become much greener wasn’t lost on any of the participants.)

There, I saw how Lenovo was making greater use of recycled materials, laptop cases from flax, packaging from bamboo, computers that are designed to last longer—and servers that are cooled with water instead of energyhungry air conditioning. They’re all part of Lenovo’s 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. Let’s explore what they are.

RECYCLED PC CASES

Lenovo sells a lot of PCs—almost 69 million of them 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 shipments, so can have a sizeable impact on the Earth’s 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 other manufacturers to follow.

Lenovo’s headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina

© NAMTHIP MUANTHONGTHAE/GETTTY IMAGES

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 in which Lenovo is reducing waste is with the increased use of natural or recycled materials for PC and laptop cases. We’re taken up to Lenovo’s design lab, where we’re surrounded by laptop case designs, stretching back to the beige IBM-branded primitive laptops of the 1980s, right through to prototypes of unreleased devices that are annoyingly hidden beneath a thick black sheet.