Angus Kidman14 January 2009, 6:09 PM
Apple likes to boast about the green credentials of its most recent MacBook machines, but when it came to being assessed by Greenpeace, the Cupertino crowd chickened out.
Apple was one of six major technology companies which declined to take part in Greenpeace's second Electronics Survey, which rates how environmentally friendly consumer technology products actually are. The others who refused to take part were Nintendo (long rated by Greenpeace as the least environmentally-conscious manufacturer), Microsoft, Asus, Palm and Philips. A total of 15 companies took part (Acer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, Lenovo, LG, Motorola, Nokia, RIM, Sharp and Samsung).
Apple has disputed Greenpeace’s methodology when criticised in the past, but has taken to boasting about its own efforts to improve environmental friendliness, describing its MacBooks as “the industry’s greenest notebook family”. However, it appears that Apple doesn’t want to subject those claims to independent scrutiny.
“We outreached to Apple as we did to the other manufacturers, but they ultimately decided not to submit,” said Greenpeace toxics campaigner Casey Harrell, who wrote the report. “We wanted all companies to participate.” The survey relies on detailed information about manufacturing processes, and testing commercially-purchased machines doesn’t produce an accurate assessment. “About 70% of the information that we use to grade is available on company sites, but not 100%,” Harrell said.
For the Electronics Survey, Greenpeace asked manufacturers to submit their most environmentally friendly current products in six categories: notebooks, desktops, LCD monitors, televisions, mobile phones and smart phones. Each was rated on a number of environmental factors, including the use of toxic chemicals, energy efficiency, and the provision of a free consumer takeback program and use of recycled components, and given an overall score out of 10. “What we’re here to do is separate green fact from green fiction.” Harrell said.
The top-scoring product was a 24 inch monitor from Lenovo, which got a score of 6.9. While that suggests there’s plenty of room for better approaches, Harrell said the results showed improvement from Greenpeace’s first round of testing in 2008.
“Progress is being made, and that's a very important thing to emphasis. We're no longer having to cajole people about the need for green. We're really focusing at this point on the depth of how green these products are. A few years ago these scores would have been much closer to zero.”
Greenpeace doesn’t want to develop a formal rating scheme for all products, since one of its major aims is to ensure industry produces environmentally-friendly products as a matter of course. “We don't want green products to be a niche product — we want them to be the product,” Harrell said.
The worst performing category was mobile phones, a situation exacerbated by the relatively frequent turnover amongst high-end phone users. However, this should not be used as an excuse, Harrell said. “If we combined the greenest aspects of every mobile phone, we would have scores significantly higher. It blows away the notion that we could not have greener products now.”