Alcoa Consumer Electronics

MacBook Air one of EcoGeek's top 5

Everybody's making lists these days. EcoGeek.org, a blog that manages to elegantly combine a love for the environment with a love of all things techie, is no exception. Their list of the top 5 Green laptops includes one of our favorites, Apple's all-aluminum MacBook Air. Click here to check out the other four.

"This gorgeous laptop is also one of the greenest available. The display on the MacBook Air is without arsenic or mercury and the case is made from recyclable aluminum," raves blogger Emilia Johansson.

Love at first sight -- Dell's new aluminum laptop

We're standing up and cheering at Dell's sexy new fashion accessory, the all-aluminum notebook computer known as 'Adamo by Dell,' introduced March 17.

As anybody who's been paying attention to Dell's Abercrombie-and-Fitch-style ad campaign will tell you, 'adamo' means 'to fall in love' in Latin. And with Adamo's cool machined-aluminum base and choice of smart-looking anodized finishes in onyx or pearl, it's not hard to believe this could happen, even at the $1999 price tag.

A full-featured yet ultra-light and rugged design, Adamo is a sleek fit into the high-end category now owned by Apple's MacBook Air and HP's Voodoo Envy. Theyre light, they're thin, they're braggable. And they're expensive.

That said .....
With all due respect, and we're talking about a LOT of respect, we're wondering if it's time to ask the PC industry a simple question: does aluminum ALWAYS have to be the sexy (read 'pricy') choice? When do we get to see it move downscale, where it can do the most good?

Here's the reasoning. Aluminum makes any computer lighter, more rugged, and especially more energy efficient than plastic, bamboo or any other material you can wrap around a circuit board. Of course these benefits are especially valuable at the high-performance and high-mobility ends of the PC market. But there's another aluminum benefit that, as the climate gets warmer and the world gets smaller, trumps the others: recyclability.

Aluminum clobbers plastic in this category. For comparison, think of the beverage industry. While craft beers still come in glass, aluminum sits proudly at the Joe Six Pack end of the scale -- delivering soda pop and mass-market beer for the millions (billions, actually) -- because it's lighter than plastic and glass and is 99% recyclable, right back into its original form. Forever. That's made aluminum one of the most popular materials for beverage containers in history, at both ends of the market.

When are consumer electronics makers going to follow the beverage industry's lead?
Maybe they are. Apple is already moving in this direction. With their new MacBook, their notebook line is now 100% aluminum, along with their iMac, Mac Pro, monitors and iPods, all the way down to the teeny tiny new $79 iPod Shuffle. And they're promoting their products as certified Green.

Now that Dell is in the game, maybe Dell will fall in love too ... with the industry's most sustainable material for PC enclosures.

As the song goes, we can't wait.

The greener Apple? No argument here.

That magnificent 17" Apple MacBook Pro, announced at MacWorld Expo in January, is starting to show up in Apple stores. It's joined a sweet lineup that includes 15" and 13" cousins and a 24" LED monitor.

Like the rest of the line, the new MacBook Pro is built different from just about any other notebook computer on the market. (Would you expect less from Apple?) Among many innovations, it features an aluminum "unibody" design: the bottom half, where the keyboard sits, is carved from a single block of aluminum.

Apple claims this design gives it many of the advantages laptop users crave, lightness and ruggedness being the top two. And of course, being an Apple, the visual impact is stunning.

But wait, as Steve would say, there's more. The unibody is part of what backs up Apple's claim that this is one of the greenest computers on the market today. How? by reducing the parts count and simplifying manufacturing, for one. By improving the heat dissipation, running the fan less, and extending battery life for another. And, of course just by being aluminum -- a material that's made for clean, high-value, low energy recycling.

When Apple introduced the unibody design last fall, there was some discussion in the blogosphere about this. Bloggers were comparing the process to plastic. The verdict seemed to be what you'd think: aluminum may be a bit more energy-intensive going in, but also chemically simpler and way more recyclable at end of life. And of course, in the meantime, it's an honest material: rugged, light, beautiful.

With the 17 now in stores, we were looking for a revival of this discussion, but haven't seen much yet. For our money, until they perfect the bamboo laptop, or the corrugated cardboard PC (which may have their own challenges) we're banking on our favorite metal as the greener way to go.