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Climate change scoreboard shames Apple, Google and eBay
The wave of favourable publicity enjoyed by the world's leading IT companies on the back of their various green policies ground to a halt earlier this week with several leading technology firms accused of lagging behind other sectors in their adoption of low carbon business models.
A new report from environmental lobby group Climate Counts assessed 56 major businesses and ranked them based on 22 criteria covering their contribution to global warming, emission reporting policies, work to limit emissions and stance towards climate change legislation and found that several global technology firms are doing little or nothing to tackle climate change.
Apple, eBay and Google received black marks with scores of less than 20 out of 100, while Amazon.com was shamed with a score of zero.
Dell, Hitachi, Siemens, Samsung, Nokia, Microsoft and Yahoo! also failed to cover themselves in glory with scores of less than 50.
Sony, HP, Motorola, Toshiba and IBM achieved more respectable scores, while printer giant Canon took the plaudits with a top score of 77.
Climate Counts said that the benchmark report would be followed by later editions, offering customers an independent means of assessing businesses green credentials and providing firms with an incentive to try and improve their standing.
"We hope Climate Counts will motivate companies to be more proactive in reducing their impact on climate change," said Adam Markham, executive director of non-profit Clean Air-Cool Planet, which backed the report. "Our hope is that the Scorecard challenges them to take climate change seriously and increase their efforts to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions."
Google, Apple and Dell will all be hoping to climb the rankings in the next edition of the report after they recently unveiled new environmental policies.
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