14 DAY TRIAL // Chinese conglomerate Lenovo has received the Gold certification for using "green technology" in eight of its Thinkvision monitors. The certification has been awarded by the Green Electronics Council, after the products had reached the highest score in the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) test.
Lenovo's EPEAT Gold-certified monitors in the Thinkvision family are the L151, L171, L171P, L194 Wide, L190X, L220X Wide, L174 and L197 Wide models. The L193P monitor received the Gold certification earlier last October.
Lenovo's models are the only products of their kind that have managed to get the gold certification until now. According to Tom Shell, Lenovo's VP in charge of visual displays, the achievement is the result of the company's long commitment towards the environment. "Lenovo is leading the way in the current wave of environmental display improvements with the introduction of a full lineup of EPEAT Gold monitors," he claimed.
The EPEAT certification is comprised of 23 mandatory and 28 optional items, such as battery life, and product longevity, hazardous substances' levels. In order to receive the EPEAT Gold qualification, the product that is subject to the test must comply to all the rules ratified by the Green Electronics Council, plus some other 75 percent of the optional specifications. At the moment, there are 289 monitors currently recognized by EPEAT as environmentally friendly. However, 273 of them could only score Silver, which shows that they managed to meet only between 50 and 75 percent of the optional specifications. The rest of seven monitors ranked Bronze, as they only complied with the basic requirements.
Lenovo has been listed on top of Greenpeace's annual list of environmentally-aware tech companies since 2007, with a score of 8 points out of 10. The only other companies that managed to score more than 7 points were Nokia, Sony Ericsson and Dell.
Lenovo's environmental-friendly monitors will become available on the market from April 18th to May 9th 2008 and will hit the retailers' shelves at prices starting with $239.99 for the L174 model.