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
