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I bought a new PC last week. Like much of the rest of the world, I bought a Dell. Last year I visited one of its biggest factories, at
Xiamen in China. It was an eye-opener.
Dell famously claims to shift completed computers, made to order, within 24 hours. And it seems to be true. You might imagine that means holding lots of stock. But you'd be wrong. Dell buys $16-billion worth of components from Chinese companies every year - only Wal-Mart spends more in the "workshop of the world". Yet at Xiamen, it holds no stock at all. Nothing.
Instead, Dell instructs its suppliers to bring what it needs to the city. Every 2 hours, Dell emails new orders for parts, which it expects to arrive at the factory within 30 minutes. "Just in time," as they say.
I watched assembly. It begins like a cafeteria, with a large pile of pink plastic trays. Each receives a piece of paper detailing the individual order - even a Dell production line is not paperless.
The tray is loaded and delivered to a small production "cell" in which a single worker performs most of the assembly in less than 10 minutes. It's surprisingly intimate. Your Dell computer is assembled by one human being, by hand.
A few hours later - software installed and tests completed - the consumer-ready computer is packed into a box at the other end of the assembly room, addressed and shunted straight into a container for shipping.
This is the bit that Dell does. But actually, I discovered, the real business is done 700 kilometres away in Suzhou, a computer city near Shanghai. Here a series of companies you have never heard of make most of the components and do much of the assembly for most of the world's branded computers. They deliver "bare bones" computers to Dell.
Suzhou is stunning. I went to the Logitech factory that makes two-thirds of the world's computer mice, including Dell's. And to another, operated by a Taiwanese company called Asustek, which makes half of all the world's computer motherboards. More than 60 million a year: Dells, Acers, IBMs, Hewlett-Packards.
Back home in England, there are no factories even one tenth the size of this place. Asustek employs 85,000 people - mostly bored, methodical, nimble-fingered 18-year-old girls fresh out of school and recruited from all across China.
Do they like the work? Yes, if they can get overtime, said David Chen, the cheery vice-president for procurement as we watched them work. How long do they stay? "We have a turnover 10%," David told me, before adding sheepishly, "not a year, a month."
Truth is, huge numbers come to work in the big city each year, get homesick, go back to mum for the Chinese New Year - and never go back. Thinking about that again, I understand the fervour of those vast crowds we saw on our TV screens a couple of weeks ago, queuing for days in the
blizzards to
catch a train home for the New Year holiday.
But they will be replaced. To keep the lines running, Asustek trains a staggering 7000 new operators every month. Right now a new influx of young girls is heading for Suzhou and the other computer cities, part of China's rapid urbanisation - a process demographers are calling the biggest human mass migration ever seen.
I don't quite know whether it is the dynamism or the heartlessness of the Chinese economy that I find most stunning. But in my small way, with my purchase, I am part of it.
So is the Dell style of delivery, avoiding retailers, a smart environmental move? I've often wondered this. Nobody seems to have done a study for consumer electronics. But I came across
a study of Amazon-style e-commerce in books, which suggested that that in urban areas, it may use more energy, but in suburban and rural areas, the efficiency of courier services compared to the long car drive to the store won out.
And despite the 24-hour claim, my computer briefly went missing last week. It turned out, Dell didn't have an up-to-date address for my local dealer. It took an extra day to track down my new machine. Not quite just in time. And having clocked some more carbon emissions, I imagine.
Fred Pearce, senior environment correspondentLabels: freds-footprint