Green rankings are helpful, but no substitute for heightened market awareness
By Julian Littler
The increasing popularity of green rankings is drawing major media organisations to contribute to an area that has been traditionally the preserve of environmental groups and government agencies. Newsweek recently published its second annual list of green rankings, which includes a ‘US 500' and a ‘Global 100' list. Also, one major online store has begun to list green rankings alongside electronics goods for sale on its website.
While Greenpeace itself helped to pioneer the green ranking system, the ranking criteria can be somewhat vague, and possibly manipulated to serve decidedly non-green ends. What the system is designed to communicate, however, is: environmental responsibility in manufacture and production, energy use in production, and consequences of product destruction or disposal.
Michael Dawson, an author, blogger and adjunct lecturer at Portland State University in the United States, reasonably suggests that ‘greenness' comprises four main criteria: material intake, material output, energy use and alternatives. This involves thinking about the kinds of materials used - i.e. how much of a given material or group of materials is required, how much material and energy is used during production, and measuring the energy needed to 'trash' or recycle the product once its useful life is over. Dawson's last point relates to comparisons with alternative technologies used for the same task and how the product in question rates against them in terms of energy use.
The four points cited here are highly relevant to any green assessment of production processes and products. We need to examine closely what we are being told in order to truly assess the green ranking or ‘greenness' of any given product or company.
An incomplete picture
Greenpeace's green ranking relies on publicly available information and serves to advocate for greater transparency in the information and policy realms; Newsweek's green ranking draws from, amongst other criteria, the opinions of "corporate social-responsibility professionals, academics, and other environmental experts." Both methods focus on public information and research relating to the companies being assessed, but advertising information and campaigns run by the corporate giants of electronic gadget production are often overlooked. The elimination of toxic chemicals, recycling policies and reduction of energy use are important factors, but so are green education and critical thinking.
Because people tend to prefer the newest products available, companies focus on getting their products to market as quickly as possible, even when a product isn't completely ready. One problem with green rankings is that they do not focus on how companies represent product production and consumption. There's no sharp focus on media and mass-marketing campaigns, some of which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and disseminate. For the companies themselves, green rankings are a stamp of approval that allows for stepped-up production.
An expanded or shifted perspective would also examine the nature of consumption itself. How should we consume? There isn't a simple, singular answer to this question, and efforts to regulate consumption come with obvious political difficulties. We can, however, make more informed choices by increasing our awareness about the products we buy, especially when we dispose of old ones and prepare to purchase new ones. What, for example, is involved in a decision to scrap an old mobile phone or television and buy a new one? This is where green rankings could play a helpful role in identifying which products can actually be recycled, partially reused or just entirely landfilled.
Incentives certainly play an important role in market-driven societies. In an article for cnngo.com, Tim Hornyak reports that a Japanese government campaign in early 2010 saw around 570,000 mobile handsets collected in 1,886 stores over a 100-day period. According to the government's report, 22kgs of gold, 79kgs of silver, 5,690kgs of copper and 2kgs of palladium were extracted from the collected handsets. As prizes were offered to encourage handset owners, the recycling effort was carried out neither through consumer goodwill nor the altruism of phone producers.
In Japan, large electronic items are subject to disposal legislation (allegedly motivated more by a desire for neighbourhood tidiness than environmental concerns), while smaller electronic devices are typically gathered up in the garbage disposal process. Hornyak quotes Japan's National Institute for Environmental Studies, saying that, in April 2005, of over 7 million discarded PCs, "37 percent were disposed of or recycled, 37 percent were reused in Japan and 26 percent were exported." As the world's major producer of electronics, Japan doesn't have a system in place to ensure that corporations will take environmental responsibility for the products which generate so much wealth for them.
In fact, Japan often exports its e-waste to other South-East Asian countries, using displacement instead of recycling as a short-term, localised ‘solution'. Hornyak relates that more than 400,000 TVs from Japan end up in the Philippines each year, but this isn't reflected or ‘penalised' in the Greenpeace or Newsweek green rankings. This should, however, send a clear signal that each production centre needs to take responsibility for its own e-waste, rather than shipping it to poorer locations to be picked over with highly toxic extraction chemicals.
This is just one example of how a green ranking system can be misleading. The Greenpeace green ranking guidelines leads readers to believe that recycling of electronic products by the producers is compelled by law in Japan, but this is only partly true.
Smart decisions
Green rankings and their criteria are increasingly in need of greater scrutiny. A UK-based communications company recently launched a new green ranking for its own mobile phones. While smartphones use far more energy and materials than regular phones, both in their daily use and production, the company argues that functionality is somehow inherently ‘green'.
Greenbiz.com reports that the decision to add functionality to the list of green criteria is to ensure that smartphones don't come out at the poor end of the rankings. In effect this green ranking system is tailored to favour the increasingly popular product, the smatphone. The website treehugger.com points out, however, that a device's multi-functionality is, potentially, significant. Jaymi Heimbuch, in an article titled ‘How Much Energy Can a Gadget Minimalist Save?', writes that using multifunctional devices can indeed reduce energy use, adding that there is potential for considerable savings on material consumption and reduced production pollution. However, a smartphone's camera is highly unlikely to replace a standard digital camera, and one could argue that this leads to unnecessary (i.e. wasteful) product duplication.
The assumption that smartphones are good because they serve as a stand-in for multiple devices is an optimistic one, but ultimately one difficult to justify or verify. As green rankings in their current form provide little by way of market forecasting, they should at least measure what goes into and what derives from a given product's life-cycle (which includes its disposal). A ranking system based on a hypothetical situation rather than the measureable scientific assessment of material use or, say, funds diverted from education for the sake of advertising, are further aspects of a system that could play a greater role in lessening environmental damage. Yet the biggest step, and perhaps the most difficult to take, is that of simply using less, consuming less.
Make no mistake: green rankings are important contributions to a society trying to improve its environmental record. They are not, however, a substitute for education and thinking about what we actually need - as opposed to what we merely want. We should recognise that some green rankings rely on our unwillingness or inability to investigate the substance of the ranking criteria.
Environmental issues are also often particular to certain locations, as are relationships with and between producers and factories. Individuals, communities, organisations, governments and companies in each area must think carefully about how to manage production, recycling - and, most importantly, consumption - of electronic products. Discussion, education and awareness are essential if we are to be sufficiently ‘empowered' to choose to buy less.
Julian Littler is a freelance journalist living and writing in Tokyo, where he recently completed a Master of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tokyo. He has worked as a researcher at the Centre for Citizenship and Human Rights, as a lecturer and tutor in Cultural Studies and Literature at La Trobe University, and is a former editor of Migration Action.
