[WSIS CS-Plenary] New study on the social impacts of notebook production

[Christoph Dietz]

Dear Madam, dear Sir,

I am happy to announce the English version of our study "Social impacts of the production of notebook PCs". The German version was already published in Novemer 2006 and had some considerable press coverage.

Within the last years notebooks became indispensable features of our daily life. We take them on the train and business travels and in more and more cases we use them as replacements for our bulky desktop PC. 70 million Notebooks are sold every year and the number is steadily growing. Despite skyrocketing performance features, consumers enjoy ever falling purchase prices: While a middleclass notebook was priced at least 2,000 Euro a couple of years ago, much better devices are now available for less than 700 Euro. But a number of recent reports pointed out some negative aspects associated with these developments: They claim that the production companies are only able to stay profitable because working conditions were pushed far below internationally recognized minimum standards. Comprehensive research by the Oeko-Institut showed that the situation in the Asian production bases is indeed problematic, a fact that is also recognized by all major stakeholder groups - including many industry representatives.

So far the consumers are left alone in their purchasing decisions: On the one hand "fair" products are well established in most supermarkets, on the other hand there is no equivalent decision-making support for complex products like notebooks. Researchers from the Oeko-Institut studied the reason for this information deficit and came to the result that high number of supplier companies and the difficult access to information in the Asian production bases are the main obstacles for sound certification. The new study "Social impacts of the production of notebook PCs" explores strategies to overcome these obstacles and identifies measures to effectively improve the working conditions in the notebook industry. Furthermore the study highlights ways how such problems could be addressed systematically for other products and industries and gives input to the ongoing development of a Social Life Cycle Analyses (SLCA).

The study is now available free of charge under www.prosa.org 

With best regards,

Andreas Manhart
 -
Oeko-Institut, P.O. Box 500240, 79028 Freiburg, Germany
Phone +49-(0)761-45295-44
Fax +49-(0)761-45295-88
a.manhart at oeko.de