Here's a wonderful example of how garbaged plastic can be used to make computers. Lenovo today announced that in the last year it had used more than 2.2 million pounds of post-consumer recycled plastics in its PCs. By doing this Lenovo becomes the leading industry player in green computing. The firm also said that these products contain a higher percentage of post-consumer recycled content than competitors’ offerings, making them among the most environmentally responsible PCs and monitors on the market today.

Based on EPEAT data, Lenovo offers the most number of EPEAT Gold-rated products overall – a total of 69 products – with those products containing the highest amounts of recycled content. For example, select Lenovo ThinkCentre desktops use up to 27 percent post-consumer recycled polymers, well above the 15 percent offered by other PC makers. Lenovo’s ThinkStation D20 workstation uses nearly 30 percent post consumer content, equivalent to 19 plastic drinking water bottles.

Lenovo has paved the way in energy efficient computing with a broad portfolio of green monitors, including the ThinkVision L2440x wide monitor, which has an LED backlit display that consumes less power than traditional displays, uses 30 percent post-consumer materials and is low halogen. Lenovo also offers a low halogen ThinkPad T400 laptop that uses reduced halogen components such as the touchpad, camera and keyboard.

Lenovo monitors use a special reflective polarizer technology to help reuse much of the light that would be lost in a standard LCD monitor, thus achieving adequate brightness while using less energy. If energy efficient monitors were adopted globally today, enough electricity to power approximately 5.33 million households could be saved by 2011.

Lenovo is also reducing packaging materials consumption by up to 750 tons annually. As part of this effort, Lenovo is using up to 100 percent recycled cushioning materials in select ThinkPad laptop, ThinkCentre desktop and ThinkVision monitor packaging. In addition, Lenovo is transitioning the IdeaPad S10e netbook packaging to a smaller, reduced-dye box to help minimize waste.