An Alternative Laptop Design Approach

Worldwide laptop sales are expecting to surpass desktop sales by 2009, reaching the figure of 150 million. Studies show that most laptop buyers keep their hardware around for only about three years, before discarding it and buying a new one. Here is how laptop designers plan to make laptops more eco-friendly across their entire life span, from the producer to the recycling plant.

Let's review through some of the problems and solutions that designers found so far.

Problem 1: Case made from plastic, plastic made from oil
Solution: Make cases from bioplastics, plant-based polymers, as this method requires less oil and energy to produce than traditional plastics do. Fujitsu made a prototype laptop with a half natural, half conventional case and now it is testing a plastic that has up to 80% bio-content.

Problem 2: Thrown away laptops go to lanfills
Solution: Upgrade your old laptop, do not buy a new one, and discard it after a few years. Soon it may be easier and cheaper to upgrade components in your laptop than completely replace it (producers should support this movement). Asus recently released a laptop that lets users upgrade most of core components like processor, video card, memory and hard drive, by simply removing one panel.

Problem 3: Power draining displays
Solution: Build laptops that use the much newer OLED( organic light-emiting diodes) technology that need only a fraction of the power used by the traditional LCD displays, as they have no backlighting.

Problem 4: Using power from the grid
Solution: Use portable solar chargers, as they already exists. The MSI Computer company developed a laptop with photovoltaic cells integrated directly into its case.

Problem 5: Laptops contain some toxic materials
Solution: Last year, the European Union enacted legal limits on toxins in electronics sold, where the U.S. introduced a similar rating system for computers.

Problem 6: Short lived hard drives
Solution: Switch to flash memories as it has no parts in motion, uses less power and it is faster. Dell produced a laptop with a 32GB solid state drive this year and Samsung appreciates that solid state drives will hold 30 times more data than they do now.