Is Toshiba Greener Than Apple?

When it comes to computer companies and environmental friendliness, there is a lot of controversy and many dubious statements made. Apple has seen its share with Greenpeace, but it looks like it is not the only company to verge the absurd.

According to environmental agency EPEAT, Apple's products are a lot less environmentally friendly than those of other competitors such as Toshiba. Apple only has 5 silver-rated laptops to its name, while Toshiba has more gold-rated notebooks than any other manufacturer, namely five. The EPEAT is a US PC environmental rating organization, and according to them, a gold rating means a product passed 23 mandatory criteria in eight categories, as well as 75 percent or more of the 28 optional EPEAT criteria. Beside gold and silver, there is also a bronze rating offered by the company.

Looking at the ratings in the EPEAT's database it would seem that Apple is at the bottom of the list for environmental friendliness, with Toshiba being at the top.
- Acer has no EPEAT-rated product at all
- Apple has 5 silver-rated notebooks
- Dell has 2 gold notebooks and 12 silver notebooks
- Fujitsu Systems Corporation America has 16 notebooks rated silver
- HP has 23 silver-rated notebooks
- Gateway has 28 bronze-rated notebooks
- Lenovo has 48 notebooks rated silver and one bronze, the highest number of any supplier
- Toshiba has 5 gold notebooks, 15 silver-ranked notebooks and 4 bronze ones; that's 24 in total.

Looking deeper at the rated products reveals surprising things about how products get certified. Manufacturers have their catalogue product items evaluated against the EPEAT tests. That sound pretty normal, until you take a look at what a catalogue product item really is. A Toshiba Tecra is obviously a different product from a Toshiba Portege, but is a Portege with twice the RAM of an otherwise identical Portege a different product? The answer is yes, in terms of sales stock keeping unit (SKU) as it has a separate product ID, price and reference in the catalogue of products.

Taking this into account, Toshiba's five gold star achievement seems a lot less grand, and all the number of products certified needs to be taken with a grain of salt. EPEAT tests might be good for comparing one machine to another, but the results have little to no bearing on the company as a whole.