17th Guide To Greener Electronics Released By Greenpeace. Winner Is…

Since 2006, Greenpeace has been offering up a Guide to Greener Electronics for consumers looking to buy the most environmentally friendly and energy efficient gadgets. They have regularly added criteria such as energy use, toxic material consumption, and even how active they are at advocating clean energy generation legislation.

The most recent list, an effective way to “name and shame” companies into greener efforts, has HP on the top spot, followed by Dell, Nokia and Apple.

According to Greenpeace, HP scored so well due to their efforts in reducing carbon emissions and lobbying for climate legislation. They also praised Dell for their plan to reduce emissions 40% by 2020, as well as for their use of sustainable materials.

This list could be seen by various companies as an incentive to work towards avoiding the use of toxic materials, reducing carbon footprints and recycling more. Getting the worst rank on a list from an organization such as Greenpeace isn’t exactly where you’d want to be as a company these days.

The organization has also run campaigns urging Internet companies to use more renewable energy to run data centers, targeting Facebook in particular this year. As a result, Facebook have said they will take energy use and carbon footprint information into consideration when building additional data centers. Previous Greenpeace lists, and criticism from other environmental organisations, have undoubtedly encouraged Apple to take a good look at their sustainable efforts.

“We’re actually trying to be a catalyst for positive change, not just tell people when they’re wrong. That’s much easier to do,” said Casey Harrell, a Greenpeace analyst and campaigner. “If we don’t care about the change, and are just saying, ‘you did it wrong, you’re wrong,’ that’s much easier. It’s more complicated and more difficult to do it the way we’re trying to do it.”

Here are the rankings for the 17th Guide to Greener Electronics:

1. HP, 5.9 out of 10
2. Dell, 5.1
3. Nokia, 4.9
4. Apple, 4.6
5. Philips, 4.5
6. Sony Ericsson, 4.2
7. Samsung, 4.1
8. Lenovo, 3.8
9. Panasonic, 3.6
10. Sony, 3.6
11. Sharp, 3.0
12. Acer, 2.9
13. LGE, 2.8
14. Toshiba, 2.8
15. RIM, 1.6

Via Greenbiz