Greenpeace released its latest annual Green Electronics Survey report earlier this month, with a number of leading brands absent from the rankings completely, including Apple and Nintendo.
While Greenpeace concluded that all manufacturers that participated in the survey made progress throughout 2008 in terms of phasing out hazardous material, improving recycling policies and generally being much more transparent, it seems strange that companies such as Apple, Nintendo and Microsoft still declined to submit products for testing.
The Greenpeace Guide ranks 18 companies' eco-credentials by considering their use of earth-unfriendly products, power consumption, product life-cycle characteristics, special innovations and their disclosure of "green" data.
Nokia wins, Nintendo responds
Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba, Samsung and Fujitsu-Siemens are at the top of the chart, while Apple, Philips, Lenovo, Microsoft and Nintendo are (still) scraping the bottom of the eco-friendly barrel.
Seemingly worst of a bad bunch, Nintendo scores "zero on most criteria except chemicals management and energy," according to the Greenpeace research.
TechRadar contacted Nintendo UK for a response to this story and we were given the following statement from the company:
"Nintendo fully complies with all the applicable laws and regulations aimed at environmental protection and consumer health and safety. Furthermore, in order to ensure our products are safe for use by young children, Nintendo products are classified as toys and therefore comply with stringent safety standards applicable to toys.
"Nintendo has not been badly rated by Greenpeace. Greenpeace chose to conduct a survey which graded companies based on the voluntary submission of information. Nintendo decided not to take part in the survey and were therefore 'ungraded'.
"Nintendo provides detailed information regarding its compliance to environmental laws and directives via the Consumer Information section of the Nintendo website and therefore felt it unnecessary to take part in the Greenpeace survey."
