Greenpeace has been suffering a wave of criticism after issuing a press release denouncing the environmental record of Apple computers. Unfortunately, for Greenpeace’s smear campaign, the lobby group’s claims are contradicted in its own research and by America’s Environmental Protection Agency, which rates Apple laptops as the most environmentally friendly on the market. The EPA rates Apple desktops as more eco-friendly than ones from HP, Dell or Lenovo (formerly IBM). And the company is recognised as an “environmentally responsible company” by the the Forward Green Leaders programme of the Sierra Club, a prominent US environmentalist group.

Yet Greenpeace ignores the empirical evidence and chooses to attack Apple’s environmental record not because of what it actually does. Instead, it ranks Apple’s environmental record as rock bottom because it doesn’t publish on its web site what it is going to do in the future and also ranks the company down because it only gives figures for the quantity of Apple products eventually recycled by weight not percentage of sales. Dell, conversely, is highly rated because it has published what it is going to do in the future and because it has a “strong definition of the precautionary principle”. In essence, Greenpeace’s ranking is based on what a company says rather than want it does - indeed one of Greenpeace’s complaints is that Apple does not link to its environmental policy from its home page.

Greenpeace’s criteria are so bizarre that they could almost of have been drawn up simply to get the result of bashing Apple. Whatever was going through the Greenpeace lobbyists’ minds when they were working on this campaign, the end product was shameful. If the result of this is to encourage people to buy products that are more highly ranked according to Greenpeace, the result will be to do more damage to the environment, not less. It’s no wonder that Greenpeace co-founder and former Director Patrick Moore has described the organisation as having evolved “into a band of scientific illiterates who use Gestapo tactics”. Greenpeace: not as progressive as you might think.