Greenpeace rates tech giants for green IT creds: Sony Ericsson leads, Dell and Lenovo top PC makers

Greenpeace has issued its latest report rating the giants in the consumer electronics and personal computer business on the green-ness of their products. Things that get considered included mobile phones, TVs, personal computers and game consoles but not servers (which explains why Cisco or IBM aren't on this list, although Lenovo does pretty well).

There are two main gauges that Greenpeace uses in its reports. It "demands" that the companies considered should take a leadership position in eliminating hazardous substances in their product design and taking back and recycling products "responsibly" when they become obsolete.

Looking beyond mobile phones and this ranking's leader Sony Ericsson, Dell and Lenovo are the leaders here, each with a 7.3 rating out of a possible 10. (Sony Ericsson isn't much higher, actually with a 7.7.)

Dell actually slipped a place in the ranking. It gets dinged by Greenpeace because it doesn't have any models on the market that are free from polyvinyl chloride or brominated flame retardants, although it does have a timeline set for their elimination. Lenovo is challenged by the same problem.

I think the surprise for me on this ranking was how poorly Hewlett-Packard is faring. It rates a 6.7, slightly above Apple's 6.0 mark. Both companies need to improve their timeline for eliminating toxic chemicals and Greenpeace believes both still need to make improvements in their takeback policies for old technologies.

Microsoft, which was pretty near the bottom, and Nokia (which slipped out of its first place spot in the last ranking) actually both lost a point on their rankings because of their takeback policies in the Philippines, Thailand, Russia, Argentina and India where Greenpeace conducted random tests.

I wasn't much surprised by Microsoft's low rank, because the company seems to be a follower in green policy, rather than a leader. The good news is that they're now on the ranking, albeit just for their game boxes.

Incidentally, you can drill down into each manufacturer's rating a little more deeply by clicking on the PDF link for each. Alas, I cannot embed those links into this blog. So you'll have to skim the whole report.