Green efforts bypass public at IFA

Manufacturers at Europe's biggest consumer electronics show touted their green credentials in vain to customers more interested in bigger and brighter screens.

Exhibitors at IFA in Berlin including Philips, Sharp and Fujitsu-Siemens tried to entice consumers with lower power use, more environmentally friendly production methods and recyclability.

Philips, Europe's biggest consumer electronics maker, uses a self-certified green logo on its more energy-efficient products. At IFA, the company said it will be making new energy-management targets public in the next few weeks.

And Sharp, the world's biggest maker of solar cells, said its new LCD TVs will offer "unprecedented" environmental performance.

Fujitsu-Siemens launched its first green personal computers for consumers, the Scaleo Green PC, which boasts energy efficiency, extremely quiet operation and a halogen-free motherboard, which will go on sale this autumn.

The company cited a Greenpeace study that puts environmental concerns third on buyers' lists of priorities after value for money and brand.

But most visitors to whom Reuters spoke at IFA seemed uninterested or even confused when asked what importance green concerns had in their buying choices.

Richard Lee, a 35-year-old electronics engineer, shrugged when asked whether he preferred green products. "I prefer Japanese products," he said, prying the back off a high-definition TV monitor to peer at the inner components.

Lee said he wanted to buy a 42-inch plasma HD TV and was prepared to pay about €3,000 (£2,030) for it.

Plasma has suffered in its battle with rival technology LCD from the fact that it uses far more power, and top makers of both plasma and LCD TVs told Reuters at IFA they aimed to reduce their models' power consumption by about 20 per cent to 25 per cent per year.

But the size of today's TV screens means that they easily draw three to five times as much power as smaller, older models, even if they are more efficient.

Frank Schmitz, 23, who came to look for a guitar audio processor, said he did care about environmentalism but questioned whether it was really possible to combine energy efficiency with some of the luxury-size TVs on display.

"I saw one big one showing images of the Arctic and the melting ice caps, and I thought: This is a bit ironic, because probably it is part of the problem," he said.

IFA runs until Wednesday. Visit our Crave section for more coverage of the event.

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