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2. Guide to Greener Electronics
In March 2006, Greenpeace released quarterly Green Electronics Guide which ranks leading mobile phones and PC manufacturers on their global policies and
practices on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers Greenpeace.org, 2008. Companies
are ranked on information that is publicly available and clarifications and communications with the companies.
Nowadays, Greenpeace has released sixteen versions since the inception of Green Electronics Guide. The guide is updated every three months. Nonetheless there
were some changes where the fourteenth edition was not published on December 2009, but on January 2010. The same goes for the fifteenth and sixteenth edition, of
which both editions were released on May 2010 and October 2010 respectively. In the following years Greenpeace’s guide got more attention. The prior
electronics sector that focus only on mobile phones and PC then was developed by taking game console and television TV into account. The number of observed
companies also increased from fourteen to sixteen companies in the sixth edition. Ranking criteria was also improved, from two domains in first edition to three
domains in eighth edition: chemicals, electronic waste e-waste, and energy.
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Figure 4.1 Guide to Greener Electronics Version 16
The ranking criteria indicate the demands of the Toxic Tech campaign to the electronics firms. The demands require companies to:
clean up their products by eliminating hazardous substances; take back and recycle their products responsibly once they become obsolete.
The two issues are related each other. The use of harmful chemicals in electronics prevents their safe recycling when the products are discarded Guide to
Greener Electronics Version 1, 2006: 1. The increasing attention on climate change issues, Greenpeace added new energy criteria “to improve their corporate policies and
practices with respect to Climate and Energy” Guide to Greener Electronics Version 8, 2008: 1.
Greenpeace consistently updates the guide to better improve the assessment of the firms operations. Fourteen companies which produce PC and mobile phones -
based on their policies on toxic chemicals and recycling- were assessed from the first to the fifth version. Later in the sixth release, the organization added the leading TV
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