Dell won't say, but if it's anything like the US, it's 1% - or less. The "Plant A Tree For Me" scheme, launched in the US in January, was brought to Europe at the start of June (Salving your green conscience via Dell will cost you an extra £3, June 7). Through it, customers can opt to pay £1 per notebook or £3 per desktop, so that a tree (more precisely, one tree per three opt-in customers) can be planted to offset the computer's estimated carbon emissions over three years.
So, how many people, or how many orders have taken it up in the UK and/or Europe? Alternatively, how many thirds of trees - or even whole ones - has Dell planted through this scheme's introduction here, we asked. Dell replied smartly: "Unfortunately, we are not able to give any figures at this time. As the Plant a Tree for Me programme launched in June, Dell is still evaluating the programme, take-up and interest."
How about the US? "In April 2007, several months after the launch of the US programme, Dell announced that it had enabled the planting of about 20,000 trees."
Is that a lot? Last year, Dell sold 39m computers, with just over half its revenue coming from the US. In the four months to April, you'd expect it would have sold about 6m computers in the US. Planting 20,000 trees means 60,000 computers were offset - 1% of orders.
Even if Dell does achieve its aim - stated by its founder in June - of becoming "the greenest technology company on Earth", one has to wonder about its customers: 99% of them don't seem to have the same aims. Still, customers' stinginess has saved Michael Dell money. He pledged in June to match buyers' tree-planting spending with his own money for its first three months in Europe. As Europe generates about a quarter of Dell's revenue, about 1.6m computers have been sold here in those two months. At 1% of sales, averaging £2 each, that's 16,250 donations, or £32,500. As Michael Dell is worth north of $10bn, one can assume he won't lose sleep.
Possibly this is a classic example where compulsion is more effective than choice: surveys repeatedly show that people prefer legislation to make tough choices about issues like climate change for them, to avoid "free riders" (who aren't self-sacrificing).
Perhaps Dell's next move should be to add the charge for the offsetting to its prices. Then the figures for the number of customers getting trees planted would be a lot simpler to calculate: it would be all of them.
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