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Environmental Product Design
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Resource Saving Design
We continue to limit the materials used in our products, while maintaining performance.
 
mission
Aiming for maximum materials saving and development of robust products
Light weight / compact design and use of recycled materials, which contribute to reduction of initial materials
Portability is an essential concept in developing notebook PCs. They are carried from place to place, and the lighter and more compact the product is made, the better it is. To that end, the case needs to be thin. But it also has to be able to withstand external forces such as dropping, shock, and pressure that may cause damage. To use recycled materials is also important for material reduction. In Toshiba note PC we make good use of recycled materials, such as recycled plastic and recycled paper.
Lengthening product life, which contributes to reduction of additional use of materials
To prevent failure of products in use stage avoids use of additional materials as a spare part. This is also important item that Toshiba implements for note PCs.
commitment
Commitments for Toshiba PC
Some examples of material reduction design are shown below. Please refer product specifications of each product if you would like to know which examples are adopted by that product.

commitment 1
Light weight and compact design
Realizing a case of 0.4mm thick
Metal retains strength even when formed thin, but it is still relatively heavy and not a good material for portable products in general. We use magnesium alloy for our PCs. Magnesium is a metal, but light one, and it brings PC case of 0.4mm thinness with acceptable hardness. Such thinness is achieved by adopting technologies called "film gate" (a thin, wide opening for pouring magnesium) and vacuum casting (casting in vacuumed condition) in the magnesium die-casting process.

Portege R700


commitment 2
Reduction of waste
In manufacturing printed circuit boards, residual materials cannot be avoided. We are making efforts to minimize them. This example shows a case where we succeeded in a 50% reduction compared to the previous board through changes in the board layout and improvement of production facilities.

printed circuit board image


commitment 3
Lengthening product life
Protect Hard Disk Drives from accidental shock
The hard disk drive is a precise electro-mechanical device, and one of the most delicate parts of the PC. We have introduced a three-dimensional acceleration sensor for monitoring the position of a notebook PC. Inclination of the notebook PC that could lead to damage to the hard disk drive is calculated, and if it is reached - if the PC falls from a desk for example - the read/write head is retracted from the surface of the disk, avoiding damage to the disk or the head.
hdd image
hdd image

Adoption of SSD (Solid State Drive)
Latest semiconductor technology makes it possible to replace a HDD (hard disk drive) with a flash memory module which has big capacity comparable with HDD and feature of non-volatile like HDD. This semiconductor memory is called SSD (Solid State Drive) .
To use SSD in place of HDD brings many excellent features, not only fast access time but also the following merits for environment:
  • Strong against mechanical shock (no mechanical structure)
  • Small size and light weight
  • Low power consumption (no mechanical movement like motor)
  • Best use of power management function (quick starting up of operating system)
  • Low sound noise(no mechanical movement)
Toshiba 128 GB SSD

Toshiba Health Monitor
Symptom monitoring for failure prevention
Toshiba Health Monitor is a system consists of hardware, BIOS and utility software. It monitors various points of a PC such as power management setting, temperature of a CPU and a battery, and current capacity of a battery. When it detects status or events which may possibly result in failure, it will raise an alarm to the user. This system is helpful to prevent trouble or damage of the PC.

Spill resistant keyboard
A spill resistant keyboard has a tray at the bottom of the keyboard. The tray can hold a certain amount of water and will resist water to penetrate into the PC through the keyboard. This function is effective to avoid immediate damage to the PC in such case that a user unintentionally spill water on the keyboard.

Honeycombed rib structure for PC case
Toshiba note PC introduced honeycombed rib structure for the thin case made of magnesium alloy in order to ensure its strength. The rib in the shape of honeycomb realized 0.4 mm thick with required strength.
Bottom case of Portege R700


commitment 4
Reduction of packaging materials
Small packaging box
We reduced packaging materials by miniaturization of a packaging box. The small size and light weight packaging box also contributes to reduction of energy used for product transportation. It is big effect because products are shipped to many countries world wide.


commitment 5
Adoption of materials of lower environmental impact
Use of recycled plastic
To use plastic recycled from various used products contributes to reduction of waste and effective use of material resource. Every Toshiba note PC is guided to use recycled plastic.
Use of recycled plastics

Use of bio plastic
Toshiba promotes use of bio plastic, whose life cycle CO2 emission is zero and called carbon neutral . Example shown here is a tape for packaging that contains bio plastic.
Use of bio plastic

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