Hewlett-Packard has become one of a select few manufacturers of notebook systems to comply with the highest criteria of a computer electronics standard set by the Green Electronics Council.

If you're not familiar with the Green Electronics Council, it's an industry group that has been chartered by the Environmental Protection Agency to set up a series of criteria for evaluating just how green particular computer products actually are. Those guidelines have already been adopted by the Federal Government and serve as a foundation for an IEEE standard.

| As we all know there are a number of challenges when it comes to computer products and the environment. The GEC has set up three categories--bronze, silver and gold--that manufacturers can use to identify how environmentally friendly their products actually are. In the case the of the gold standard, that means the systems meet 23 required criteria and at least 75 percent of the optional criteria that the GEC has developed under a grant from the EPA that is administered by a non-profit organization called the International Sustainable Development Foundation. Thus far, the GEC says that about 109 million units that meet the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) criteria were sold in 2007, which the group claims represents about 22 percent of all machines sold in 2007. The GEC claims that roughly equates to reducing hazardous material waste disposal by 124,000 metric tons while saving 42.4 billion kilowatts of electricity.

As corporations increasingly become concerned about green computing, the GEC criteria can provide them a place to start for setting up their own standards for what factors will determine whether they should buy a particular system or not. One of the biggest problems with being green is that most people don't really know where to start so the GEC work provides a baseline from which to launch a green computing initiative.

The new HP systems are an extension of the company's new Elite line of notebooks, which are at the forefront of a battle between market leaders HP, Dell and Lenovo for dominance of the corporate accounts.

The machines basically all come with the latest state-of-the-art features so it's becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate them based on style and features. For example, the new HP Elite notebooks are semi-ruggedized, which negates some of the advantages that Lenovo has been know for. Lenovo, meanwhile, is now adopting low-voltage processors in line with its major competitors. Longer term, business notebooks will increasingly adopt many of the same features as consumer notebooks as the requirements for each environment continue to converge.

That ultimately means that the decision about which PC system manufacturer to give your business to is going to come down to increasingly intangible values such as their level of support for green computing initiatives.

It's hard to say just yet that green computing is going to be a dominant issue on the list of those intangible qualities. But it's pretty clear by this point that green computing and e-waste is definitely going to be an increasingly larger concern that in the final analysis when all other attributes are equal is going to sway business customers one way or the other.