Greenpeace Ranks Tech Companies

Greenpeace has just released an updated edition of their Green Electronics Guide, which "ranks leading mobile and PC manufacturers on their global policies and practice on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers," based on publicly available information.

If you look at the extreme ends of the spectrum, there aren't really any surprises. Europe has been concerned with e-waste for quite some time, so Finnish Nokia takes top honors (they're tied with Dell, a company that's been proactive in this area); China's rapid growth has led to issues with its environmental policies (i.e., there aren't that many), so Lenovo is at the bottom. The real surprise is Apple, who you'd assume to be the most eco-friendly company out there, placing third from the bottom. For complete details check out the Green Electronics Guide page.

An aside here: A few years ago I wrote a series of articles on e-waste in Canada and discovered how amazingly hard some companies make it to turn up information on this stuff, even if they're doing good. Kudos to Greenpeace for taking this on.

And while I'm handing out eco-praise, I'd also like to add big ups to the folks at Other World Computing; I recently bought an external hard drive enclosure from them and was amazed at how their boxes and packing material were exactly the right size to do their job, without a scrap of wasted material. If only more companies could follow their example.

Update and correction: Reader James Baussmann pointed out that I accidentally referenced the August Green Electronics Guide, not the more most recent edition. The new report is more and less encouraging: Overall, the companies surveyed have improved, but Apple hasn't budged from its score of 2.7/10, which leaves it dead last.