5 October, 2008

Cut down on trees

I'm glad to see the market has overwhelmingly rejected Dell's 'environmentalist' tokenism: rather fewer than 1% of purchasers opted to pay £1 extra per laptop or £3 per desktop PC in order to plant trees.

As I've said before, I fully support the idea of companies reducing the environmental impacts of their products, but slacktivist gimmicks are pointless. Improvements will come from product design, manufacture (how & where) and packaging: invest in getting that right, rather than deflecting attention from sub-optimal products by offering a sop to the tree-huggers.