Scope of Research RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
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high quality articles, the researcher collected top tier journals from Emerald, JStor, Google Scholar, Elsevier, Interscience Wiley, Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan
Management Review, Sage, and the likes. The data collection method was conducted by tracking data of environmental
or sustainable or green marketing index in some publication. Unfortunately, some of the published information point to environmental or green performance, unlike green
marketing strategies. In search of the data that contain elements of green marketing strategies, the choice fell into Greenpeace’s Guide to Greener Electronics. The
rationale is the NGO provides publication that assessed companies’ strategies and policy aiming at greening their products, policies, and systems. It is quite different
from other publicly indexes which rather contain companies’ performance output of the strategies than companies’ strategies.
Greenpeace has been campaigning for electronic companies to reduce toxic chemicals usage and improve take back recycling for the past seven years. It involves
regular meetings or calls with the majority of the electronic companies to exchange information and discuss company progress and relevant industry developments
Greenpeace.org. It means that Greenpeace deal with direct contact with the insiders of the companies, as well as monitoring the improvement that companies made.
Nevertheless, Greenpeace only rank companies on their public information and practice, not private information to make sure that the ranking is transparent and
companies can remain publicly accountable Greenpeace.org. The goal is clear that Greenpeace aims to encourage companies to transparently and accountably publish its
progress in greening effort to the society. That is why beside the primary sources by
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regular meetings or calls, Greenpeace relies more heavily on secondary sources on published progress of greening efforts. The published materials gathered from the
companies’ website and its sustainability report. Greenpeace wants to know how transparent and accountable the scrutinized companies in publishing their greening
efforts. To make the assessment of companies’ greening efforts reliable, Greenpeace
set stringent standards of which every company should meet. The standards itself are summarized in the ranking criteria which encompass criteria on toxic chemicals, on e-
waste, and on energy respectively. The assessment itself was conducted from June 2006 to October 2010. In the early five versions, Greenpeace only assessed fourteen
companies. In the sixth version, it adds categories on TV and game console manufacturers, counting eighteen companies in total.
The ranking criteria reflect the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics companies. The two demands that Greenpeace deserves are that
companies should clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances and should take back and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
The two issues are interchangeably linked. The use of hazardous chemicals in electronics prevents their safe recycling when the products are discarded. Companies
score marks out of 30, which are then re-calculated to give a mark out of 10 for simplicity. But then Greenpeace adds one more criteria on energy.