Greenpeace and its games…
Apple and a host of others chose not to participate in the group’s annual survey that unabashedly claims specific products and companies are more or less green, without actually testing one single product.
If you were going to measure how green electronics products actually are, would you 1.) Randomly source real products from stores and test them for actual compliance with the manufacturers’ claims and published government standards?, or would you 2.) Ask companies to voluntarily submit unverified paperwork claims and then publicize those claims without any fact checking?
Guess which method Greenpeace uses? Here are some of the more egregious—they really said that?—things in the group’s latest report, Green Electronics: the search continues…:
“…this survey evaluates the products that the manufacturers themselves consider to be their greenest.”
“…leading manufacturers were directly invited to submit their greenest
products via an assessment form that was sent to them.”“…testing commercially-purchased machines doesn’t produce an accurate assessment.”
Because we said [they said] so…
According to an APC fluff piece on Greenpeace’s report, “Greenpeace doesn’t want to develop a formal rating scheme for all products, since one of its major aims is to ensure industry produces environmentally-friendly products as a matter of course.”
Further, Casey Harrell, who is referred to as a “toxics campaigner” for Greenpeace and the author of the report, says that “About 70 percent of the information that we use to grade is available on company sites, but not 100 percent.”
Apple and five other companies that were invited by Greenpeace chose not send in the other 30 percent and not to participate in this latest—no actual standards, no actual testing—sham of a marketing exercise. Fifteen other companies, including Nokia and Lenovo, both of which were ranked highly by the group, sent in their unverified claims and Greenpeace dutifully repeated them as the gospel truth.
Apple claims “the industry’s greenest notebook family.” Is that a true statement? Perhaps.
However, the veracity of Apple’s claims haven’t been physically tested by Greenpeace. In fact, this so-called environmental group hasn’t tested a single product—not Apple’s, not Nokia’s, not Lenovo’s, none, nada, zip—they’ve just repeated the marketing claims of companies that submitted them.
This is an absurd situation. How can any product or company be labeled “green” (or “ungreen”) without actual physical testing of the products concerned…
What’s your take?
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