Small Gains In Electronic Item Efficiency = Great Green Marketing Hype - Salt Lake Tribune

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Consumer electronics aren't exactly easy on the environment - they consume electricity that contributes to global warming, and toxins leach out of them when they end up in landfills. But the industry that's inviting us to get a new cell phone every year and toss out that old TV in favor of a great new flat panel is also trying to show that it cares.

At the world's largest trade show for consumer electronics, starting Monday in Las Vegas, manufacturers will be talking not just about megapixels, megahertz and megabytes, but about smart power adapters that don't waste as much electricity, batteries that are easier to recycle, and components made from plants. Many of the products on display will be striking rather small blows for the environment, but the industry is realizing that even in electronics, going ''green'' can be a powerful marketing tool.

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Television sets are another big power draw, and will become more so as analog TVs are replaced with high-definition sets. Though more energy efficient per inch of screen size, their larger size more than makes up for any gain in efficiency. Plasma sets in particular easily draw 400 watts, or as much as four older tube-type TVs.

A much more power-efficient screen technology will be on display at CES: Samsung Electronics Co. will be bringing a 31-inch TV made of organic light emitting diodes, or OLEDs. For now, however, the technology is much too expensive for the mass market, and there's no word on when or if Samsung plans to sell the screen. Sony has announced an 11-inch OLED display for $1,700. Cell phones, while hardly power-hungry, are quite wasteful: Nokia says two-thirds of the energy a charger uses is drawn when the connected phone is already fully charged. GreenPlug of San Ramon, Calif., will be previewing a solution to that problem, a universal power adapter that ''talks'' to gadgets to determine their energy needs. Apart from cutting wasted electricity, GreenPlug aims to eliminate the need for a different adapter for every phone, MP3 player, and other portable gadget.

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http://www.sltrib.com/ci_7890840