My New Favorite Color

But I believe we’re at a turning point.

More and more, solution providers will need to consider green factors when they choose hardware suppliers. A particular vendor’s ability not only to comply with the various regulations coming into play around the United States—indeed, the world—and the programs it adopts to help channel partners deal with their own recycling and materials disposal challenges could make the difference about which one you might choose to engage and represent.

The first big milestone in the green world order will be the July 1 adoption in Europe of the Restriction on the use of Hazardous Substances, more commonly know as the RoHS regulation. Get out those old chemistry textbooks. The law bans new electrical or electronics equipment that exceeds certain levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyl and other stuff I’m afraid I’ll misspell.

You may ask: I sell in the United States, why should I care about a European mandate? Well, for starters, any of your customers that have divisions on the continent will want reassurance that products they standardize on here can cross the ocean to other sites with no problem. Plus, the United States is considering similar laws.

And that’s just for new equipment. As VARs look for ways to convince customers to upgrade aging PCs, servers, printers and monitors, increasingly their ability to offer a service that helps their prospects get rid of this stuff will make the difference. In New Jersey, where I live, it’s against the law to simply dump old equipment. Not to mention the prep work that needs to be done to make sure that hard drives are stripped of sensitive data.

Display products companies, including NEC Display, Philips Business Solutions and Samsung Electronics, are trumpeting their planet-friendly manufacturing strategies and holding them up as a differentiator with the channel. Xerox, likewise, has come up with a special chemical called E-Agent to reduce the amount of power that goes into making printer toner for the Xerox DocuPrint and Xerox DocuTech series.

How green are your vendor partners?

What’s your view on eco-strategy? HEATHER CLANCY, Editor at CRN, appreciates your comments at [email protected]..