Greenpeace Searches for "Green Electronics" and Finds ... Not Many

Greenpeace on Wednesday published a report called "Searching ... for Green Electronics." The results of the report show what we should probably already have known: electronics, at least now, are decidedly un-green.

The report is a snapshot of some products available on the market between August and November 2007. Greenpeace asked manufacturers of desktop and note book PCs, mobile phones, PDAs, and game consoles to provide information on up to three products in each of the categories.

Greenpeace only evaluated submitted products, which meant, for example, that they were able to evaluate no game consoles, as none were submitted in time. Additionally, such major companies as Apple, Asus, Microsoft, Nintendo, Palm and Sharp (among others) did not submit any products or submitted products too late. Of the companies approached, 14 of them provided information on 37 products.

The survey evaluated the products against four criteria: use of hazardous materials, energy efficiency, product lifecycle (including recyclability), and innovations / marketing.

Scores were adjusted to be between 1 and 10.

The highest score was 5.30 by an Sony Ericsson T650i phone. In fact, say what you will about Sony laptop batteries, Sony had the only products in the survey with scores above 5 - the aforementioned T650i, the Sony Vaio TZ11 laptop at 5.29, and the Sony Ericsson P1i PDA at 5.10.

No desktop PC scored above 5, with the Dell Optiplex 755 and HP dc5750 tying at 4.71.

All in all, pretty sad.

A few notes, though:

• If the manufacturer did not provide all the details on a product, the score would end up lower. Greenpeace (perhaps rightfully so) was concerned that a manufacturer would claim such information is unknown or unavailable as it "indicates a lack of initiative to assess, and hence an aspiration to improve, the environmental performance of their products."
  

• Products cannot be compared across categories, only within a category.
  

• Obviously the report only reflects on the products submitted, not the entire line of a manufacturer.
  

It's unfortunate that the timeframe was last year; it would be interesting to see how the MacBook Air would have fared since a) Apple has often been criticized over the "greenness" of its products (and by Greenpeace, as well), and b) Apple has trumpeted how environmentally-friendly the Air was designed.

You can read the full report (.PDF) here.