Sampling Technique RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
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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.
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