EPEAT's progress: More than 317 million registered products sold

I'm astonished to hear that the Electronic Products Environmental Assessment Tool (aka EPEAT) is barely four years old, but during its lifetime, more than 317 million products registered under the program have been sold. That's the latest according to a just-published 2009 EPEAT progress report.

Right now, EPEAT covers pretty basic desktop technologies and peripherals, including tower systems, notebooks, workstations, thin clients, monitors and integrated systems. Reported sales of EPEAT-registered products in 2009 were about 44.5 million units, which was up about 10 percent in the United States. The organization figures that more than half the notebooks now sold in the U.S. market are EPEAT-registered. The governing organization that watches over certifications figures that the lifetime impact of the systems purchased just in 2009 translates into the following:

• More than 10 billion kilowatt hours of energy saved (the equivalent of powering 900,000 U.S. homes for a year)
• The elimination of 2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (or the same effect as keeping 1.4 million U.S. passenger cars in the garage for 12 months)
• The avoidance of 93,000 metric tons of water pollutant emissions
• A reduction of 72,000 metric tons of hazardous waste, as well as enough mercury to fill 372,000 household thermometers

Now, if we could just get EPEAT and, for that matter Energy Star, to move more quickly to handle servers and printing and imaging devices. While Energy Star DOES handle server technology now, its focus is on pretty lowend configurations. So far.