Design for Environment

Environment, Health and Safety
»	EHS@Sun
»	Resource Conservation
»	Recycling
»	Commuting and Commute Alternatives
»	Workplace Health and Safety
»	Manufacturing Efforts
»	<span>Design for Environment</span>
»	Product Reuse

Environmental Stewardship: Protecting Everything under the Sun.

An important part of Sun's commitment to responsibly manage all aspects of its business is minimizing the environmental impact of its products while still maintaining the extremely high standards of reliability and availability. Suns' products are used to run enterprises and operate networks and anything that compromises quality and reliability are unacceptable. Nonetheless, Sun's Design for the Environment program assists product engineers in developing products and packaging designs that incorporate:

Supplier Management

Sun's design process ensures that our suppliers and business partners work from environmentally friendly design standards and specifications, and approach their activities with a better understanding of the ecosystem. Sun's product specifications prohibit the use of certain substances such as PVC in parts and heavy metals in packaging, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs), or other substances believed to affect the ozone layer (ODSs). Sun is working with all of its suppliers to ensure that all of Sun's products will comply with the requirements of the European Union's RoHS Directive that mandates the removal of lead, mercury, cadmium, hexavalent chromium and certain flame retardants from electronics. Click here for additional information on Sun's RoHS compliance program.

In addition, Sun ensures that its external manufacturers adhere to sound environmental principles. Virtually all of the external manufacturers' facilities where Sun's products are assembled have received ISO140001 certification.

Energy Efficiency

Energy efficient computers and servers conserve natural resources and reduce emissions related to electricity generation. To do so, Sun must meet customer demand for performance with powerful, fast computers -- while balancing the energy requirements these features necessitate.

Sun was an early signatory to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star Office Equipment Program in 1993. This program encourages information technology equipment manufacturers to produce energy-efficient products in an effort to reduce the global climate effects caused by emissions from fossil fuel burning at electricity generation plants.

Because of the greater performance and capabilities in workstations as compared to personal computers, power management in these products is more challenging. Sun is the only UNIX® workstation vendor with a desktop product line in full compliance with the EPA Energy Star guidelines.

In 1997, Sun was recognized by the EPA for encouraging internal use of its Energy Star's energy-saving Power Management™ software on Sun workstations. Power Management automatically powers off the monitor and/or system when not in use. The software ensures that the System State is saved and can rapidly be restored when the user wishes.

In addition, Sun's new SunRay internet appliances, which can replace standard PC's and workstations on the desktop use only a fraction of the energy as traditonal workstations and personal computers. For more information on the SunRay products click here.

Sun's Energy Star Compliant Products:
Sun desktop products* and monitors are compliant with the U.S. EPA Energy Star Guidelines. For a current list of Sun's products go to the EPA EnergyStar Website

Design for Recovery, Reuse, & Recycling

Applying life cycle planning to product design helps engineers create features that enable the full recovery of materials for reuse or recycling. Disassembly features allow for the quick sorting and removal of components and materials for servicing. Product upgrades are intentionally planned to both prevent the premature retirement of materials, as well as protect a customer's investment. And many components such as boards, memory, and disk drives can be added or replaced with the latest technology improvements.

Once recovered, Sun extends the life of older Sun equipment by refurbishing it and selling it as re-marketed equipment, or by disassembling and separating valuable components for reuse elsewhere.

Sun design features include the use of:

Separable bonds for electromagnetic shields. Instead of using permanent methods such as ultrasonic welding or spray coatings to unite the components, engineers can design shields with the minimum number of heatstakes (bonding points), or they can snap-fit materials so metal shields and plastic housings are easy to separate and recycle.
Embedded ISO 11469 identification codes of plastic type on plastic parts. This increases the chances of reuse, and makes it easier to sort materials that are in demand.
Less material. Thin-wall plastic design conserves the amount of material needed while maintaining strength requirements, and yields extra environmental benefits by reducing the amount of fuel needed to transport new, lighter products.
Nonpainted plastics making recycling and recovery easy.

Sun has maintained a product recovery and recycling program that has been economically self sufficient for many years, which is testament to the fact that the products are designed and manufactured in a manner that makes recycling easy, efficient and economical.

Reducing Substances of Concern

Computers are complex machines comprised of many materials and substances. Some customers have procurement policies that seek to minimize certain substances that, if released into the environment, may harm people or ecosystems (Note: these substances are not released through normal computer use). Sun works to meet these requirements by:

Designing products that reduce or eliminate these substances
Developing alternatives that may suit customer needs
Ensuring processes reduce the likelihood these substances are released into the environment

An example:
Some of Sun's server products have back-up power systems that are powered by rechargeable batteries. If a customer has a blackout, the server will remain online long enough to back up important data.

Nickel-cadmium batteries were commonly used for such applications. However, cadmium is a substance of concern to some customers because it may be released into the environment at the end of the battery's life cycle. In fact, many countries restrict the disposal of these batteries, and recycling facilities are not widespread.

In addition, as shown above, Sun is working to comply with the European Union's RoHS Directive.

Environmental Design Principles

Packaging Design and Product Manuals. Sun package designers emphasize the "four R's": reduce, reuse, recover, and recycle.

Working closely with Sun's product engineers, packaging engineers determine how rugged each product is, and tailor the optimum amount of packaging for the product without compromising protection during tough simulated transit testing.

Sun packaging engineers also work to enable packaging materials to be recycled worldwide. They specify the use of homogeneous packaging materials wherever possible -- plastics of a single, rather than mixed, composition, or a foam endcap that can be used for packaging several models of computers, for instance. Avoiding the permanent bonding of dissimilar materials such as foam and corrugated paperboard makes it easier to manually separate materials.

Other Sun package design practices include:

Avoiding the use of substances of concern such as lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, or chlorofluorocarbons
Migrating to brown corrugated cartons away from white, bleached cartons, which can cause emissions of chlorine compounds at the paper mill

Even Sun's product manuals are eco-friendly: Typically, in the past text pages were made with 50%-recycled stock, with 10% post-consumer waste. And the manual covers were made from recycled stock. Now, these formerly large, bulky paper manuals are being replaced with manuals entirely on compact disks that use a much smaller amount of material and are easier to dispose of and recycle and by internet accessible manuals, that use no tangible medium at all. Much of the software,software patches and updates that used to be available only on tapes or compact disks are now available for download from the internet doing away completely with the need for tangible media

*Note: All of Sun's desktop workstations, in most configurations, are Energy Star qualified, however, customers are able to order configurations that might result in the particular unit not being compliant with the Energy Star standards.

Contact Me »

Print-friendly Page