OEMs Are the Greenest!

Let's pretend that we are all big PC manufacturers, and that we want to sell more boxes. Since everybody's talking about being more "green," maybe we could say that it's more environmentally friendly to trade in that old PC on a new one! Yeah, that's it—older PCs aren't worth as much, so companies might have to pay to recycle them. That makes buying new systems cheaper in the long run than keeping the old ones, right? 

No, but that's the myth, ironically enough, reported in a CNET article on reuse. Asset management professionals have long known that longer lifecycles almost always mean lower total cost of ownership.  And according to Gartner, corporate lifecycles have been lengthening for years. So many companies understand it is more frugal to use, refurbish, and use some more—and they are voting for longer lifecycles with their policy and practice. Gaming the asset depreciation curve hoping that higher residuals from early retirement will reduce TCO never works in a market that has ample supply and prices that are lower every year.

From an purely technical standpoint, even after four or five years of corporate use, a PC has three or four more years of useful secondary life. It is simply wrong to assume that such machines must be recycled when there are many low income users here and in developing countries that can make productive use of them. From a sustainability standpoint, by amortizing the cost of manufacturing and subsequent recycling over a longer lifecycle, the environmental impact at any given point in time is reduced. Social welfare dictates that the more people with access to computing technology at cheap prices, the better.

If it didn't sound so cynical, I might suggest that the OEM's call for shorter lifecycles was less about environmental good, and more about the sustainability of their profits.