As the AV business gets overcome with environmentally friendly buzz, some companies face hard choices while others find ways to exploit

opportunity.

As with pretty much every industry, especially those built around the manufacturing and deployment of sophisticated electronics, the audiovisual and IT businesses are ripe right now with buzzwords and hype tied to the green movement.

From ubiquitous company-sponsored recycling programs to industry task forces to manufacturer press releases, it seems that virtually everyone is looking to tout products and services that use fewer hazardous materials, consume less energy, and produce less waste.

“Everyone we’ve spoken with, from distributors to manufacturers, has expressed an interest in this,” says Elizabeth Eames, communication director for Project Green AV, a non-profit industry education group based in Long Island, NY that was kick-started about a year ago by AV dealer Projector Lamp Services.

“As an industry, we’re trying to be more compliant and sustainable,” adds Michael Dannenberg, senior technology consultant for Vantage Technology Consulting Group. “A lot of companies out there are trying to do their part right now.”

Certainly, it must be assumed that much of this stems from earnest good intentions, a desire to make the Earth a cooler, less polluted place. And, of course, with the entire world more culturally and politically tuned into environmental causes these days, a lot of it is about basic product marketing.

“If we can say we’re greener than the other guy, there is an advantage to that,” adds Eric Anderson, VP of manufacturing for QSC Audio, which has taken steps recently to limit, among other things, manufacturing and packaging waste.

Meanwhile, green marketing, in a lot of cases, is also getting applied to things like energy-saving techniques that manufacturers would naturally employ anyway simply because they save money. “I’ll be honest with you, if we reduce power consumption [during manufacturing], we reduce costs and increase profit,” says Anderson.

With so much green rhetoric floating around, it’s a little tough to get a clear picture on all that is really being done right now by AV manufacturers and dealers to make the industry more environmentally sustainable. But largely because of stringent environmental legislation coming out of the European Union, there has actually been a great deal of movement on the part of AV and IT manufacturers lately to change the way their products are produced and what goes into them.

Perhaps most influential has been the EU’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances directive (RoHS), which officially took effect in July 2006. Essentially, RoHS prohibits the use of hazardous materials, including lead, mercury, and cadmium, in things like toys and electronics sold in EU member companies. “We want to be in business in Europe, so we comply,” says Steve Lampen, multimedia technology manager for Belden Electronics and Communications.

“It is a challenge,” Anderson adds. “If you do not meet these regulations, then you will be limited in the markets you can go into.”

“Following the implementation of RoHS, each of the more than 6,000 individual products in Belden’s catalog had to be altered,” Lampen notes, with materials deemed hazardous by the EU stripped out and replaced with an acceptable alternative. Most impactful to Belden, Lampen explains, is the restriction on lead use. Switching to lead-free solder has increased, over the last several years, the incidence of failure in electronic components due to tin whiskers, in which tin coatings sprout microscopic crystalline fibers that break off and cause short circuits.

“The repercussions have been huge,” Lampen adds. “For example, lead was also commonly used in the jackets of cables as a compound to stabilize the color. Without lead, under fluorescent light, the color is wiped out after just a few years. We’ve since found compounds that keep the color in, but it’s taken time and money.”

Without hazarding a guess in terms of an overall dollar figure, Lampen says it was “quite a stretch and investment right off the bat” for Belden to render itself RoHS compliant. “But it would have been way too much trouble to maintain two separate product lines.”

Philosophically, Lampen supports such environmental legislation. “We have 200 years of the Industrial Revolution that we have to pay for,” he notes, even though he doesn’t agree always on the precise execution of these laws. “It’s easy to say let’s get rid of something without looking at all the financial obligations that grow out of that.”

Inevitably, he says, directives like RoHS — enacted at a time when the U.S. government had largely abdicated any global leadership role in terms of environmental legislation — will mean that technology managers will end up paying more for AV- and IT-related goods and services. “There’s a percentage in the price tag to be green, and you’re going to pay for that,” he adds. But for all its impact, RoHS is just the beginning.

Of particular concern for electronics manufacturers competing on the global stage right now is the so-called China RoHS, which restricts the same six substances that the EU directive does. Ultimately, it’s expected that the Chinese restrictions will be enhanced as to be even more stringent. “That will be even harder,” Lampen says. “We’ll be looking at a longer list of things that are not allowed.”

Meanwhile, back in the EU, Anderson says the emerging REACH directive (Regulation, Evaluation, Authorization of Chemicals) will also soon impact entire supply chains of globally positioned manufacturers, with the chemicals and substances used during the making of products scrutinized. “The good news for us is that we tend to have very dry manufacturing processes,” Anderson notes. “We’re an assembly house. But we do use things that are made with chemicals, so there will be some restrictions. Ultimately, I think there will a bigger price tag for everyone than RoHS has had. There will be some difficulties in meeting that requirement.”

More pressing to Costa Mesa, CA-based QSC is the fact that it operates its manufacturing plant in the most environmentally progressive state in the country. For example, on January 1 of this year, the California Air Resources Board began regulating formaldehyde emissions from particle board, which is used in loudspeaker cabinet manufacturing. “I think that law is going to go global,” Anderson says.

Meanwhile, the British press reported earlier this year that the EU is also close to passing energy performance standards on televisions. Such a mandate, the media reports claimed, would diminish the sales of a number of power-hungry plasma display models.

Jim Noecker, director of systems sales engineering for Panasonic Professional Display Company, acknowledges, “We’re definitely feeling the push to be more green and energy efficient,” while noting that his company has rid its products of lead and mercury. However, as much as it wants to improve its product’s environmental efficacy, Noecker says that “progress” will come from changing the testing methods for plasma, not the product design.

“The energy use specification on our plasmas is peak power usage, which is very misleading,” he explains. “Actual consumption on normal usage could be 50 percent of that. With plasma, we have to dispel the myth on energy use.”

While AV vendors are reacting in various ways to the myriad environmental mandates that are popping up all over the globe, there are other, less mandatory pressures for the industry to consider. AV and IT systems integrators, for example, are increasingly being asked to design systems that acknowledge the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmentazl Design (LEED) guidelines. As it stands right now, there isn’t even a criteria for AV or IT within LEED. However, there exists a strong belief among AV/IT business denizens that a day will come when virtually every new building project will fall under the guidelines, and only LEED-certified contractors and manufacturers will be eligible to bid.

Meanwhile, at June’s InfoComm conference in Orlando, representatives are meeting to further develop green standards for AV. Among other topics, they’ll discuss ways in which the industry can not only save energy, but contribute sustainable instruments to the building process like lighting control, as well as reduce use of nonrecyclable materials through executions like digital signage and cut transportation fuel usage through videoconferencing.

Of course, a lot of these missions seem more intended to develop new business than to cure what ails the planet. But to Vantage Consulting’s Dannenberg, the purity of the intentions — whether opportunistic or coerced — is irrelevant as long as the AV/IT industry is getting cleaner and more efficient. “It may be only about marketing to some at this point,” he says “but at the end of the day, if it’s sustainable, is that a bad thing?”

Daniel Frankel is a Los Angeles-based freelancer who regularly writes about the businesses of entertainment and technology. He can be reached at frankel_daniel@hotmail.com.

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