EarthDrive Claims World’s First Earth-Friendly USB Drive  E-mail
Written by Jaymi Heimbuch   
Tuesday, 05 August 2008


In a hunt for a new USB drive with more storage space than my sad little 256 MB that I bought for a whopping $56 in 2003 (yikes!), I ran across the ATP 8GB EarthDrive, which touts itself as the world’s first earth-friendly USB drive. The drive has some great features, such as it is shock proof, water proof and dust proof, has built in security software, drive partitioning, password protection and is nice and big with 8 GB of storage. But what makes it so hot as a world’s first for eco-friendliness?

This claim to fame comes the fact that it is made from bio-recycled plastics and is fully recyclable at the end of its life. Taking it a tree-hugging step further, a portion of all EarthDrive product sales goes towards the planting of trees through their partnership with American Forests. For $48, I think I can make a pretty guilt-free upgrade.


Comments (7)add
Fodder for Greenwashing
written by Carl Hage , August 05, 2008
Products like this that market based on "green" just feeds the skeptics, who claim all such marketing is just greenwashing. The chances that the case will be recycled is ~0%, but a USB key is insignificant in landfill space. Just using a camera memory card would use even less packaging, but is easier to lose!

Buy a USB drive based on the best value-- they are pretty much equally green. Save the green marketing for products that really make a difference, e.g. a router/modem that goes into standby mode (~0 power) when the connected computer is powered off, or a desktop computer that is as energy efficient as a laptop.
Why do you publish this crap?
written by Kontol Raksassar , August 05, 2008
These kinds of products are cynically marketed to people with 'green' leanings.

I don't know why this site publishes this kind of rubbish. How many people are going to recycle their dongle when it is time to replace it? I would hazard a guess at close to zero.

Has the manufacturer actually established certified recycling stations for the dongle?

The purpose of this site
written by Jacob , August 05, 2008
What the above commenters fail to recognize is that this eco-website differentiates itself from the others by promoting eco-gadgetry and green geekables. This is exactly the kind of stuff that should be in here. Ecogeek sees the future as being energy and resource intensive, just in a more efficient and renewable way.
M$ only
written by e , August 06, 2008
I think the case being made from eco plastics is great. Then they lost me with
has built in security software, drive partitioning, password protection
. That means they have some funny software that mangles the partition table enough to fool Windows XP into recognising more than the first partition... a bug in XP as I see it. ...breaking it for anything else that expects a normal DOS partition table like any other disk.

There are stable, well tested, robust & free tools that can do all those things with a normal USB key.

If they made the case thinner like the other waterproof ones & took all the rubbish off it, I'd buy one. It doesn't have to be any thicker than the USB jack. The one on my keyring isnt.
...
written by Treepata , August 08, 2008

What the first two commenters didn't understand, was that the primary objective of the bio-recycled housing of this device, was that it didn't use normal (environmentally unfriendly) plastics. Of course the bio-recycled material is not intended to be recycled by nature as such (this is also not claimed on the products webpage). Here in Europe the product has to be brought to recycling facilities anyway, so it will never will reach a landfill (hopfully) to bio-degrade by itself. As I said, the bio-recycled material is (as far as I understand) to conserve fossil fuels and unnecessary CO2 emmission (even though this contribution might be small). All things help, and maybe this pioneer will convince other manufacturers to do the same.
...
written by D , August 08, 2008
Bio-recycled plastics vs. regular plastics. Give me a full carbon and ecosystems cost analysis on the difference between the two, and then maybe then it might make me feel a little bit better. Right now, it seems like the company is just trying to jump on a hot market.
...
written by Pook , August 12, 2008
With products like this I think the best way forwards is just to make them as small as possible, using up as little resources as they can.

I mean, do people ever actually throw these away anyway?
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