The Museum of HP Calculators

HP Forum Archive 21

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How "Green"?
Message #1 Posted by John W Kercheval on 6 May 2012, 2:03 p.m.

Does anyone know how green these HPs are? Are they eco- friendly?

      
Re: How "Green"?
Message #2 Posted by Allen on 6 May 2012, 2:27 p.m.,
in response to message #1 by John W Kercheval

Other's may feel differently, but I have not seen anything "green" that wasn't a marketing scam. Every product (even clean air and water) takes energy and resources to produce- it's just a matter of where and what kind of pollution you're willing to tolerate.

Take light bulbs for example. The old (now obsolete) incandescent bulbs are cheap to make, but generate wasteful heat. Energy efficient compact florescent bulbs are cheaper to operate, but are laced with mercury. Finally, LED's are cheap to operate, but at $20 to $60 each, are not very green on the wallet. I believe it's all just a matter of where you are willing to tolerate the mess.

HP's total gross calculator production (by mass) compared to other companies is probably fairly small, so I suspect even the dirtiest HP process would still produce a fraction of the pollution of say Casio or TI production line.

Other examples of "green" marketing: Bio-diesel fuels which take more energy to produce than they make, low-flow toilets (have to flush 3 times to empty), etc...??

            
Re: How "Green"?
Message #3 Posted by John W Kercheval on 6 May 2012, 2:31 p.m.,
in response to message #2 by Allen

So this means HP is not green?

                  
Re: How "Green"?
Message #4 Posted by Allen on 6 May 2012, 3:06 p.m.,
in response to message #3 by John W Kercheval

John, I suggest yours is a good question, but not answerable because "green" is a marketing platitude, not a quantitative measure in any sense.

                        
Re: How "Green"?
Message #5 Posted by John W Kercheval on 6 May 2012, 3:59 p.m.,
in response to message #4 by Allen

Allen: Agreed in spades. I was merely providing some Sunday levity.

Can we agree that HP is more "sustainable" than TI?

                              
Re: How "Green"?
Message #6 Posted by Maximilian Hohmann on 6 May 2012, 4:52 p.m.,
in response to message #5 by John W Kercheval

Quote:
Can we agree that HP is more "sustainable" than TI?

I don't really think so. The last calculator products of HP that I bought were all packaged in those horrible blisters that contain more plastic than the calculator itself (and are difficult/impossible to recycle because it is mixed with the internal cardboard linig) wheras the TiNspire that my son got for school came in a cardboard packaging.

And additionally - at least here in Germany - Ti sells one calculator (the Ti-30 ECO RS: http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/DEUTSCHLAND/productDetail/de_ti30_eco_rs.html) that is made from 100% recycled plastic and is 100% solar powered. Since it is one of their best selling products they probably sell more units per year of this calculator here than Hp of all calculators together. This should make quite an impact.

Edited: 6 May 2012, 4:53 p.m.

                                    
Re: How "Green"?
Message #7 Posted by bill platt on 7 May 2012, 12:17 a.m.,
in response to message #6 by Maximilian Hohmann

I hate solar. They need too much light to function.

                                          
Re: How "Green"?
Message #8 Posted by Maximilian Hohmann on 7 May 2012, 3:30 a.m.,
in response to message #7 by bill platt

Quote:
I hate solar. They need too much light to function.

Not more light than is necessary to read the LCD!

                                                
Re: How "Green"?
Message #9 Posted by Crawl on 7 May 2012, 6:49 a.m.,
in response to message #8 by Maximilian Hohmann

Yeah, I haven't had too much problem with solar calculators. Ones that are totally solar powered usually work pretty well; I've had some from TI that could work at night under a street light.

I've had different experiences with dual powered solar calculators. Of course, they have a battery, too (and which seems to last a very long time), so normally they don't need to work with only light, but on the other hand they have smaller solar cells so they work less well than solar-only calculators when they battery dies.

I had a Casio dual-powered calculator that I removed the battery from to see how well it worked in low light, and the answer was "not that great". But I've had my Sharp 506w long enough that its battery died once, so I tried using it solar-only in that time. It seemed to work in reasonably low light, *except* that doing an integral in low light would cause the display to blank off and the calculator to reset. This calculator's statistics functions are also quirky: Rather than keeping a running sum of certain parameters as you enter data, it calculates it all at once after entering data only after you ask for some statistics result (ie, the mean). In office light, it could handle 63 data points, but more than that would also cause it to reset. If it was "smart" enough to throttle its performance in low light, it could probably do anything.

                                                
Re: How "Green"?
Message #10 Posted by bill platt on 7 May 2012, 7:17 a.m.,
in response to message #8 by Maximilian Hohmann

Not true at all. That's the problem.

                                          
Re: How "Green"?
Message #11 Posted by Mike Morrow on 7 May 2012, 10:43 a.m.,
in response to message #7 by bill platt

Quote:
I hate solar. They need too much light to function.

Twenty-five years ago when I often administered reactor theory exams to students studying for a nuclear power plant operator license, I would warn the group that only ten solar-powered calculators could be in use simultaneously during the exam...in order to not cause the room's lighting to dim.

Sometimes a little humor relieves a stressful situation.

            
Re: How "Green"?
Message #12 Posted by Katie Wasserman on 7 May 2012, 10:18 a.m.,
in response to message #2 by Allen

Talk about marketing hype, here's a Victor calculator that loudly proclaims it's "greenness".

      
Re: How "Green"?
Message #13 Posted by Mike Morrow on 7 May 2012, 10:51 a.m.,
in response to message #1 by John W Kercheval

The butt-ugly disaster known as the HP 38G is green, even the LCD!

            
Re: How "Green"?
Message #14 Posted by Paulo MO on 7 May 2012, 3:44 p.m.,
in response to message #13 by Mike Morrow

Nicely put :-)

P

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