Lenovo Tops Eco-Friendly Ranking

gollum123 writes to tell us that according to a recent list compiled by Greenpeace, Lenovo has topped the list of "eco-friendly" companies scoring an 8 out of a possible 10 while Apple fell to the bottom of the list with only a 2.7. "Iza Kruszewska, Greenpeace international toxics campaigner, said the industry had made some positive steps in the last 12 months with firms starting to act rather than just issue statements of intent. Of the 14 companies profiled, said Ms Kruszewska, nine now score more than five out of 10."

Comments

Re:Bah.

[owlnation]

Greenpeace has no credibility on this subject.

Absolutely 100% correct! Greenpeace has very little credibility in most subjects. They have considerable history with manipulating data to suit their fund raising profile, and have been caught doing on a number of occasions - Bret Spar is one example, though others can be found easily . Remember Greenpeace is NOT a charity. Historically, they have provably lied to make money.

Environmental economics was the subject I studied at university; I have undertaken environmental assessments in the field. .To perform a fair, accurate and precise assessment of a company's environmental impact requires weeks, if not months, of intensive on-site research and measurement. It requires full access to all processes within the company, and access to privileged information.

There is no way Greenpeace has access to this information. A true and fair assessment cannot be done externally. This is a fund raising publicity stunt and absolutely nothing more. It has no credible science or economics behind it whatsoever.

Re:Why Apple came last ....

[smithwis]

Go to here: EPEAT
And check out the silver awards in all the categories. Notice that no manufacture has been awarded a gold yet.

In all of the categories Apple is represented by a few models which score at or near the top of the pack.

Something seems fishy....

[God of Lemmings]

This seems to be part of a campaign bend apple into more of a green product.

On their own page, they go as far as manipulating the truth to make it appear that
Apple is doing less work than it is actually doing: http://www.greenpeace.org/apple/about.html

"Apple finally came around to a limited recycling program in the US, but they can do better."

This is worded as if it just happened recently. Except that the US (and Japan) take-back program started
up in 2002. (Announced in 2001) It includes not only recycling of its own computers, but also other
vendor's computers and monitors. I wonder which way they consider this to be "limited"?

http://www.apple.com/environment/recycling/
http://www.apple.com/environment/

The images at the top of the Greenpeace site show Chinese children holding color iMac keyboards dating
before 2000.... before recycling programs in the US and Asia actually existed.

The page is designed to get Apple to do two things:
        * Remove the worst toxic chemicals from all their products and production lines.
        * Offer and promote free "take-back" for all their products everywhere they are sold.

The question here is, is it reasonable to persecute Apple for not meeting an arbitrarily set "worst toxic chemicals" goal? And I say this because "worst toxic chemicals" is fairly ambiguous.
They recycle plastics, foam, paper and whatnot from their products, they follow a number of environmental standards in the US and Europe and maintain their own.

Should Apple offer free "take-back" worldwide? Even Levono doesn't do so.
http://www.pc.ibm.com/ww/lenovo/about/environment/ ptb_us.html

However, in the very least, it should be reasonable for Apple to accept recycled equipment worldwide, if at
a fee.