D&H Launches Green Portal To Identify Environmentally Friendly Products

The portal, which went live last week at www.dandh.com/gogreen, was, according to D&H, in response to increasing requests for green information coming through its customer channels.

"I do think a lot of customers and a lot of consumers are starting to look at green as one of the decision swings attributed to a product," said Jeff Davis, D&H's senior vice president of sales, in a Channelweb.com interview. "If it has a green call-out, or if it's a little bit green, that's really seemed to make a difference in the last 10 to 12 months. It's an underlying idea that's been kicked around in this industry for a while and has reached the consumer level."

D&H's green portal searches more than 2,100 products at present, including those from major partners such as Acer, Advanced Micro Devices, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and others. A product's "greenness" is determined using certifications it holds, such as from EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), EnergyStar, the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS) and the Greenguard Environmental Institute's Greenguard Certification Program.

"Whether you're looking for a notebook computer or whatever else, anyone that has these certifications will come up in a search," Davis said. "Even if you're not searching by green, we call out green products on the site by putting a little green leaf in product search results so you can quickly scan. Then, when you hover over the leaf, it tells you which certifications apply to the product, whether EnergyStar or EPEAT Gold or whatever."

Reaction from VARs and vendors to the green portal has been positive, Davis said, and if anything, it's spurred vendors in particular to learn more about certifications.

Intel, Cisco and Toshiba are all examples of vendors with a lot of green-friendly products, according to Davis, and no one vendor stood out as being particularly "not green."

The push toward green also has spurred D&H to be a better corporate citizen in its own operations, Davis added. The distributor has increased its recycling efforts, decreased the amount of packaging materials it uses in shipping and has looked to document-management solutions to cut down its internal spending on printing and use of paper.

If something looks a little different about the distributor's logo, it's that it's also been changed to green from D&H's usual red to commemorate the launch of the green portal.

"As we were developing a way to really call out green to our resellers," Davis said, "we started to get heavily involved in green initiatives ourselves."