From the ThinkPad to the Yoga, the look of Lenovo laptops has always been evolving. But what has been maintained, according to Lenovo, is a long-standing ethos of making the highest quality products with the least environmental impact.
That might sound trivial enough to you, but Lenovo has really led the charge towards greener technology over the past decade. The company switched to 100% recycled packaging in 2008 and has even experimented with materials made from bamboo and sugar cane.
But Lenovo has new tricks up its sleeve. I was invited to visit Lenovo’s Raleigh headquarters to see the innovations for myself and to see if there was any validity to the company’s confident claims about its industry-leading sustainability initiatives.
Packaging and materials
Similar to many other laptop makers, Lenovo has very easily fleshed out its sustainability efforts through its packaging. The tan Lenovo eco-box is as synonymous with the brand as its red logo. Made from bamboo and sugar cane fibre, the boxes are easily recyclable and compostable. The company said it chose these materials because of their rapid growth and easy accessibility. Looking inside a Lenovo box further shows a meticulous effort to avoid materials that are harmful to the planet.
Devices and even accessories like USB-C to HDMI and RJ45 cables are also housed in linen bags made of bamboo and sugar cane fiber instead of plastic. The cardboard bumpers that hold the products in place are made from the same materials. In addition, Lenovo is working to make all packaging plastic-free, detailing the change from plastic-coated to paper-coated cable ties, and using paper-based security labels instead of plastic. The text on the packaging is also printed with water-based ink. Such efforts have already been implemented in product lines such as the ThinkPad series.
Lenovo says the lessons learned from its packaging are starting to carry over to material sourcing in many of its product lines. Using not only recycled plastics, fabrics and forged aluminum, but also introducing new materials from eco-friendly sources and sources unique to the technology space. The company noted that its new Z-series devices are made of 75 percent forged aluminum, which saves energy and consumption, while its Yoga series devices are made of 50 percent recycled fabric, and its Tab P12 Pro, the world’s first Android tablet, is made from 100% recycled aluminum.
This year, in our look at sustainability trends, we’ve seen a small shift around micro-trends from materials just to materials, to processes, to manufacturing, everything, said Ali Elliott, senior design manager at Lenovo PCSD, Strategic Design and Innovation. We are seeing many new natural materials. We are also seeing a huge leap for design that includes an apparent sustainability right from the start.
The company has invested in a number of new sources that are not only environmentally friendly but also aesthetically pleasing. Accessories for the ThinkPad Z series include cases made from vegan leather sourced from cactus plants. The ThinkPad X1 series, meanwhile, is a long-running line of laptops made with recycled nylon.
Legion gaming series laptop covers are made from the fuselage or interior carbon fiber parts of airplanes. Using reclaimed scrap material from Boeing, the pieces are hammered into patterns that ultimately make the covers unique to each model. Similarly, the cover of the ThinkPad Z13 was created from woven stems of flaxseed plants and bonded in a biodegradable resin. The stems are also a waste product and in the weaving process create a unique design for the cover of each ThinkPad Z13 model. Lenovo notes that it doesn’t have any exclusive use of flaxseed stalks as a material, it’s simply the first to market. The ThinkPad Z13 also features a 75% recycled aluminum chassis and ships in one of the 100% plastic-free boxes.
When we look at a product, we want to make sure we’re introducing sustainable materials into as many components as possible, Elliott said.
Futuristic design
As Lenovo leads the way for future endeavors, it is taking into consideration the wishes and needs of its customers. Among those talks are long-running discussions about customization, modulation, and how much consumers want to be involved in the repair of their devices. Lenovo notes that these conversations will shape the look of the devices for years and decades to come.
Clients vary. There is a broad spectrum of what customers in commercial or consumer spaces want. What kinds of changes are they sensitive to, and when it comes to remediating, with a spectrum of capabilities and awareness on that issue, said Aaron Stewart, Distinguished Designer at Lenovo Group Operations and Head of Next UX User & Customer Experience.
After conducting a consumer study on repair preferences, Lenovo learned that repairability was important to most consumers when considering a laptop purchase. Digging into these thoughts, the company found that 60% prefer repairs to be done by manufacturers, while 20% prefer some sort of do-it-yourself option.
The research led Lenovo to consider several reuse and repair options that could benefit consumers who may be a little more hands-on. Called Project Aurora, it remains in the concept stage, but Lenovo is exploring execution methods.
We’ve looked at how to organize components into devices. We are studying the effects of construction in a different way. It’s about evaluating approaches to repair and update. We don’t have the definitive answer on this, but we’re looking at which components need to be fixed the most and which should be more affordable, Stewart said.
Lenovo said it initially sees such a design for enterprise customers. Other research options involve the possibility of remodeling and recycling some standardized parts of products into a new product at the end of its life cycle. For example, a functional display on a laptop could be removed and reused as a smart display. Lenovo also provides devices with various detachable parts that customers can send back to the manufacturer to have replacement parts sent back to be reattached manually. The questions the company still grapples with are how these efforts can be not only feasible but sustainable at the same time.
Dells Project Luna may be the most fully realized concept of sustainable and serviceable laptops we currently have. But Lenovo seems determined not to fall behind in this regard.
Water cooling for sustainability
Outside of Lenovo’s hardware and material efforts, the company has also developed technology that benefits solution-based sustainability at scale. Its Neptune liquid cooling system has been implemented in supercomputers in data centers around the world as an option to compensate for the rapidly increasing power demands on components such as GPUs, CPUs, memory and network adapters, but also the power needed to keep systems cool.
Standard data centers are typically air-cooled, with a cold aisle in front of the servers and a hot aisle behind them. The air is circulated through the racks in an air conditioning system to be cooled and back up when hot to repeat the process.
Anywhere between 30% and 40% of any server is used to pull the system. It is only used to run the fans. It’s not calculating the data. It’s not moving the data. It’s not storing data. It’s just air in motion, said Patrick Moakley, director of performance marketing and artificial intelligence at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group.
With components expected to rapidly increase in power specification and capacity over the next few years, any method of reducing power and efficiency is welcomed by organizations using supercomputers.
Industry should produce 500 watt CPUs and 700 watt GPUs. Bearing in mind that even the smallest components, including memory and network adapters consume power, businesses may need to invest in computers that draw 1,000 watts per system, Moakley added.
The Neptune liquid cooling system works like a dry cooler, similar to an automotive radiator with liquid flowing through coils inside a supercomputer, interacting with ambient air to keep the water and system cool . This method automatically clears the 30% and 40% energy expenditure required to cool systems while processing data.
For these dry coolers to work, a temperature difference between the water and the outside air is sufficient. So when the air is cooler than the water coming out, then the act of blowing air over those coils, the heat will naturally be dissipated by the water and go out into the universe to then be cool. And then return the water, especially eventually, that water temperature that we need for these services, said Scott Holland, Lenovo Thermal Engineer.
This is where Lenovo’s liquid cooling system steps in as a dual benefit in helping organizations maintain or even boost their performance with water, while having the source an efficient by-product that can be used elsewhere.
You come up to a point where fresh water enters. You discharge hot water going out. The advantage of having hot water escaping the system over hot air is that it’s really, really hard to contain the hot air. Hot water is contained. I can do something about it. I can send it to some other place on my campus, Moakley said.
Lenovo has partnered with a multitude of organizations around the world to recycle water, such as for heating swimming pools and buildings. His partners include Harvard University, Yale University, the Max Planck Institutes, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the National Computational Infrastructure and the Indian Space Research Organization, among others.
With data center power having nearly quadrupled over the past decade and is expected to quadruple again by the end of the decade, it is likely that even more organizations will soon be interested in alternative cooling methods.
There is a long way to go
With e-waste growing beyond the huge problem it already is, all of these advances might seem like baby steps. And in many ways they are. It’s crazy to think that with all the innovation we’ve experienced around technology, the question of sustainability remains so elusive. It seems that cheap and wasteful materials are so ingrained in the fabric of how our technology works that abandoning them would require a total reboot in how we think about technology.
Companies like Lenovo may not be able to abandon their current way of manufacturing laptops, but I have no doubt that sustainability issues are no longer an afterthought. Processes are reconsidered, experiments are undertaken and products are reinvented. We are far from the sustainability revolution, but the gears have started to turn.
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