Greenpeace picks IT industry's green leaders

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 09 December 2010 15:14

IT Industry - Strategy

Greenpeace has published its fourth semi-annual Cool IT Leaderboard, which ranks global IT brands on their efforts to build emission-reducing innovations, mitigate their own energy footprints and support groundbreaking climate and energy policies. Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu were singled out as leaders. Apple was nowhere to be seen.

According to Greenpeace, "A few companies stand out for the comprehensiveness of their approach to climate action, or have distinguished themselves in a key realm of leadership, and the remainder are simply market followers.

"Cisco, Ericsson and Fujitsu deserve praise for exhibiting the boldest and most encompassing industry efforts to address climate change to date, efforts which have earned them top scores on the Leaderboard."

Greenpeace has produced three separate rankings: by companies' efforts to reduce the environmental impact of their products, of their own operations and their political advocacy. Their scores in each category were weighted 40, 25, 35 respectively to give an overall score that had Cisco, Dell and Ericsson in the top three positions. Others in order were: Fujitsu, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia Oracle, Panasonic, SAP, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba and Wipro.

Despite praising the efforts of the green IT leaders, Greenpeace says they are not doing enough to influence the 'green villains' in other sectors.

It notes that Newsweek recently released its Green Rankings, which order the Top 100 global companies according to sustainability performance. "The IT companies score well in Newsweek's assessment; six [of Greenpeace's] Leaderboard companies were placed among the top fifteen when evaluated against all types of companies," Greenpeace said.

"But the world's climate and energy policy frameworks are still disproportionately and negatively influenced by companies at the bottom of Newsweek's ranking - utilities, fossil fuel companies, and other heavy polluters'¦

"Meanwhile, many IT companies, rated 'greenest' by Newsweek for their own environmental performance, are still failing to pull their political weight in advocating for a clean energy transformation."

Greenpeace says that, If IT companies want to drive transformation in the energy sector, they will need to "wake up to the importance of active policy engagement to overcome entrenched dirty energy interests," but it suggests they "may fear that they will anger business partners, such as utilities and energy producers, if they were to take a bolder stance on energy and climate issues."