Toshiba offers "carbon neutral" notebooks

 

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By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 30 Nov 2007 at 13:16

Toshiba is offering "carbon neutral" notebooks to customers in the UK. The Carbon Zero scheme is being managed by a company called co2balance, which is planting trees to offset the emissions created during the life of the laptop.

For a one-off donation of just over a pound, customers can offset the emissions caused by manufacturing the laptop, as well as transportation and powering it.

The total footprint of the laptop was calculated, based on an estimated three years of use, and the cost of offsetting this was found to be just £1.18 - although Toshiba hasn't revealed exactly how this figure was reached. That money is spent planting trees in a dedicated Toshiba wood in Cumbria.

At the moment the scheme is entirely voluntary, and customers have to make the payment separately from the purchase of a computer.

"I think at the moment it's a new thing for Toshiba and it wants to see how it's received. It's fair to say that if it goes down well and it's popular then it may be built into the price of the machines," says a co2balance spokesperson.

Toshiba aren't the first company to offer such a service; PC World already offers a carbon neutral desktop PC, and Via offers a carbon neutral processor called the C7-D.

There is some controversy surrounding the effectiveness of carbon offsetting schemes, and co2balance admits that some schemes have been ineffective because the projects being funded would have been undertaken anyway. The Toshiba wood, however, would not have been planted if not for this project, co2balance claims.

"We can't do much about emissions at the moment, we can use some renewable source of electricity but we can't wipe out our carbon footprint totally," says a co2balance spokesperson. "You can try and reduce an equivalent amount of carbon emissions in other places, though."