The late Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, uncovered an important environmental principle-the Someone Else's Problem Field (SEP), a fictional technology that can make something "virtually invisible" simply by making it look like somebody else's problem.

I suspect that the electronics industry's environmental issues have been lurking under a SEP field. While issues like toxic content, energy consumption, waste reduction and product recycling have been identified since at least the mid-'90s, little has been done. Everyone is concerned about the environment, worried about their children's future and understands that something has to be done. Unfortunately, nobody has been doing anything about it because it was always somebody else's problem.

Managers and executives in most companies thought environmental issues were not their problem because environmental, health and safety (EH&S) departments handled those issues. EH&S people were glad to clean up the messes created by manufacturing, but wished engineering would avoid creating the problem in the first place.

When I suggested that designers use green principles to re-engineer processes and products, everyone thought it was a great idea, but they were under orders to keep costs as their priority.

Thankfully, I see a break in the SEP cycle. At this month's International Symposium on Electronics and the Environment (ISEE), forward-thinking companies talked about adopting environmental performance strategies as competitive tools to make their operations more profitable.

In three ISEE sessions devoted to supply-chain topics, engineers and managers explained how they've re-engineered their record-keeping and reporting structures to track environmental performance. That let them monitor their suppliers to ensure the materials and processes that went into their subassemblies met critical green requirements. As product take-back and recycling programs grab hold, these accurate materials declarations will be the key to making them financially viable.

Once these tools are in place, they help to move more-subtle issues out from under the SEP veil. For example, there's talk of expanding the standard materials declarations in place with U.S. and European technology industry bodies to include figures of merit for the manufacturer's energy and materials efficiency. Besides letting a buyer measure the resources required to make a product, such standardized figures would shed light on hidden manufacturing costs.

Getting control of the supply chain is a great start toward making the environment an integral part of the business equation, but there's more to the story. If you have any news about what you, your coworkers or your competitors are doing to address environmental issues I'd love to hear from you at lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.

LEE GOLDBERG WRITES ABOUT NETWORKING, COMMUNICATIONS AND GREEN ENGINEERING FOR EE TIMES AND HIS NEW VENTURE, WWW.ANALOGZONE.COM

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