The most recent crop of "green" PCs makes me laugh. Sure, they're more environmentally safe—in the way a conventional bomb is safer than a nuclear one. But they're still giant honking pieces of metal that suck up electricity the way an open fire hydrant wastes water.

I know a certain segment of our readership will sneer at anything green and probably stop reading at this point. But green isn't just about global warming. It's also about our pathological dependency on imported oil, it's about our inability to find places to dump our trash, and it's about the gigantic toxic clouds of pollution rising over Chinese cities where people are literally breaking apart old computers with hammers to salvage the precious metals. (See the recent film Manufactured Landscapes for that last one.) Those toxic clouds are making their way over a Pacific near you, according to NASA, so don't think that by sending our dirty work overseas we've knocked it out of sight. Or maybe the products of our dirty work will just end up in our toothpaste or pet food.

There are three pillars of the green mantra: Reduce, reuse, and ship overseas to create toxic clouds—I mean, recycle. The word recycle is so fraught with complexities that you should focus on the other two. Sure, your manufacturer will "recycle" your desktop PC. But will it do so by sending it to some faraway town where sub-subcontractors will poison the water supply and turn the air into Venusian soup by burning the circuit boards to melt out the metals? Of course, no PC company is responsible for this—it's all the sub-subcontractors, those unaccountable, mysterious sub-subcontractors. Look at the green report cards for major manufacturers and you'll find they all end up evaporating somewhere down the chain of subcontractors.—next: Want to Get Green? >