Green Design: A Fad, or a Real Business Opportunity?

I remember a few years ago when the "go green" bug bit many electronics companies, and all sorts of save-the-Earth buzzwords were trending. Everyone was talking about sustainability, eco-friendly production, carbon footprint-tracking, and, yes, greener component and device design.

Even though I had hoped that the industry would own up to some of these environmental initiatives (who doesn't want to save the planet?), I frequently dismissed the corporate do-good promises. It costs manufacturers a lot of upfront money to take a long-term, socially conscious, tree-hugging stand. I wasn't convinced executives -- after evaluating financial go-green-or-go-partially-green-or-don't-go-green trade-offs -- would choose the greater good route.

Fast-forward to 2012, and I have to say I'm not 100 percent certain about the status of designing for green programs. Has the concept advanced so much that it has become an embedded, must-have capability to win new electronics business? Does going green no longer require any sort of public convincing via press releases or Web content acknowledging that companies actually provide this service and do this work? Or have green initiatives silently been moved to an industry-wide backburner, seen as a less important fad to latch onto? Powering through some online searches, very little recent news pops up for the electronics sector on this topic, giving me reason to believe that the latter of the options are true.

There are snippets about the Green Electronics Council being formed in 2005 to "support the effective design, manufacture, use and recovery of electronic products to contribute to a healthy, fair and prosperous world." But the last news item posted on the site was in 2009.

In 2004, Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE: TXN) "embarked on an ambitious project to build the world's first 'green' Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified semiconductor manufacturing facility in an effort to reduce construction and operating costs and the company's impact on the environment." While it was a noble effort mirroring what many companies globally were doing at the time -- making their fabs more environmentally-friendly, energy-efficient, and sustainable, resource-wise -- there was not a lot mentioned of the actual design of green products.

Of course, environmental regulations like RoHS, WEEE, and other international legislation restricting hazardous materials and imposing recycle/take-back programs have forced many organizations to go back to the drawing board and address these issues from a design perspective -- or, at the very least, create documents and databases explaining a product's footprint in greater detail.

And there was what seems to be a short-lived Greener Gadget Design Competition that was aimed at "generating outstanding design innovations for greener electronics," but news about this appears to have trailed off since 2010.

Similarly, the organization Greener Gadgets, which is owned and copyrighted by the Consumer Electronics Association, does a good job of advising consumers about how much electricity their devices consume, recycling products, and buying green. But it is consumer-focused and targets the post-production crowd.

There is astonishingly little information out there about what companies are doing today when it comes to designing products in a sustainable, green way. I'm going to assume that I just missed something, or that it's become so commonplace that no one needs to talk about it anymore. But I can't shake the feeling that companies have cast aside these important considerations and are still focused on building green buildings or struggling through making sense of global environmental-compliance regulations.

I sincerely hope to be proven wrong.