Lucid Nonsense


Talking Green

Tuesday, 31 March 2009

Greenpeace have released the latest edition of their Guide to Greener Electronics for March 2009. From an Apple perspective it’s certainly an improvement on their original appearance on the report, where they were roundly criticised for poor environmental standards. To me it just highlights the mixed feelings I have with this reporting system; at the time Apple’s response was that they were taking strong steps to improve their systems, it’s just that they hadn’t been talking about it much. That’s certainly not something Apple could be accused of now.

That’s the thing that bugs me about these reports. I’m all for promoting better environmenal standards for electronics companies but these reports are based entirely on what the companies say they do on their official websites, not necessarily what they actually do. It certainly gets the green electronics issue into the news but I dislike the idea of what, to many people, looks like a definitive “X company is greener than Y company” report, when in fact all it truly reports is “X company’s PR department is better than Y’s”.

It’s likely the best information that Greenpeace can easily gather but I would have felt happier with the report if it was presented with less of an implication that “these companies are greener” and more of a highlight on “these companies have better published policies”. Campaigning for better environmental policies is in itself laudable, getting companies interested in bragging about their environmental activities can only help push green standards; so why not say that? That’s all Greenpeace can say with these reports, so I’d rather that’s what they did say. I can almost guarantee that any news sources that report on this won’t quote what is a fairly important rider towards to this release:

Each score is based solely on public information on the companies website

It’s probably a net positive when taking into account the extra PR it brings to environmental issues but to me that’s all it is, a PR exercise, and the actual positions of the companies included has to be taken with a rather large pinch of salt.


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