Dell Founder Wants to Offset Energy Consumption
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By DAMON DARLIN
The New York Times
Jan. 9, 2007
LAS VEGAS — Michael S. Dell, who made his name building computers, has a new goal: planting trees.
In a speech today at the Consumer Electronics Show here, Mr. Dell urged the electronics industry to foster the planting of trees in order to offset the impact of their devices’ energy consumption on the environment.
He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called “Plant a Tree for Me,” asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two nonprofit groups that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.
Mr. Dell said the planting of trees would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offsetting the equivalent emissions resulting from the production of electricity for the average three-year use of a computer.
Dell intends to cover the administrative costs of the program. Mr. Dell was not able to estimate those costs.
Customers in the United States will be given the chance to donate when they order a Dell PC online. Mr. Dell also said the program would be expanded in April to consumers overseas.
Mr. Dell said in an interview before the speech that tree-planting initiative came up during a meeting that he and Kevin B. Rollins, Dell’s chief executive, held to discuss the company’s efforts to recycle and reduce the use of various chemicals like brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride. He said he thought, “This would be a fantastic way for our customers to get involved.”
Mr. Dell said, “I am personally interested in the environment, but I have to give credit to our customers, who have encouraged us in this direction.”
Dell offers its customers free recycling of their old computers. Dell said it wants to recover about 275 million pounds of old computers from customers by 2009. “We’re on track, a little ahead, in fact, to meet our goal,” he said.
“I challenge every PC vendor in the industry to join us in providing free recycling,” Mr. Dell said. “This is a better way than government regulation.”
In his speech, Mr. Dell made a plea to the telecommunications industry to speed its efforts to lay high-speed fiber cable that would provide more capacity for moving content like movies and videos on the Internet to the home.
“I applaud the telecommunications companies that are driving fiber to the home, and I encourage the entire telecom industry to step up and make such fiber available much more broadly,” he said.
He noted that high-speed networks are already available in Denmark, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Romania, Slovenia, Dubai, Iceland and Kuwait while the United States lags behind. He said that just 44 percent of American households have a high-speed broadband connection and that only 1 percent of those homes have a fiber connection. |
