Greenpeace slams Nintendo

Loves Nokia. Also, whales.

The hippies at Greenpeace have taken time out from chasing Japanese whale boats, er, scientific vessels, to go on about how green electronics makers really are.

In its report, Guide to Greener Electronics, Greenpeace ranks Nokia as the greenest outfit on the planet, while it slams Nintendo, which does not know what to do with its Wii, as the worst.

However Greenpeace seems to get a mite tetchy when it comes to company marketing. It has been giving points to companies that promise to do well, but taking points off if it was just marketing spin.

Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Lenovo all dropped in the rankings for failing to live up to public promises to eliminate polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from their computers by the end of 2009.

It noted that HP formally pushed back its phase-out of the chemicals to 2011. Dell - at unlucky 13th place - will fail to meet the 2009 deadline, while Lenovo changed to a 2010 deadline, which Greenpeace claimed will be dropped.

The so called Green Apple dropped into 11th place from ninth because, while it had some success in making products completely BFR-free and "virtually free of PVC", it was still using "unreasonably high threshold limits for BFRs and PVC in products that are allegedly PVC-/BFR-free."

Microsoft was told off for not having a better customer e-waste return policy.

Samsung got flowers for producing PVC-free LCD TVs and lowering the overall amount of toxins in its other products by significant amounts. Sony Ericsson moved up from fifth place to third for improving its energy efficiency.

While Nintendo got points for switching to PVC-free internal wiring in its gaming consoles, the rest of its machine was a toxic waste site.

Nokia, with its take-back program for used phones, got first place.