Just like Corporate Social Responsibility in the late 90s, “greenattitude” has become the new trend to follow for any brand who wants to stay / become “in” and updated (if not cool).
Few brands really care about environment or at least try to minimize their negative impact on this one. Japanese ones do. They’ve understood long ago that being productive & capable of generating wealth for the shareholders isn’t opposed to being environmentally responsible (apart from the fact that Japanese society is more about “us” rather than I, “future” rather than present and they have that “Zen” & philosophical way of life (also inside their companies) that makes them stay way ahead of us.
Since Greenpeace started their “Guide to Greener Electronics” in August 2006, many companies have included a Green report or have tried to explain how green they’ve become (ing) in the latest years through expensive marketing campaigns.
However it seems that Greenpeace doesn’t take into consideration ALL the appropriate data for their charts. They exclude for example one of the major contributors to climate change: energy expended during manufacturing. One who does have a fairly exhaustive evaluation criterion is the EPEAT (and is quite funny to see how companies like Toshiba which are not well marked by Greenpeace become “Gold” environment awarded by the EPEAT).
Examples:
Sony (Japanese) is being traditionally considered as a “green” example, not the greenest ok, but they seem to care. They released their “Sony Eco-thinking” campaign last year and is now present in all their European HPages (not in the US version… o.O?). They explain how coooool they are, how much they care about the planet, how eco are their products, processes and they even have an “eco news” section!
Other Japanese companies who understood that “green” is quite important long ago… car brands like Honda or Toyota. However not all Japanese companies love mother Earth, Nintendo seems to hate her with all its heart.
Apple on the other hand don’t seem to love MaMa neither. They crap as much as they can although they’ve also tried to explain their reasons on their “Environmental Update“.
On their 2008 version they state that “For the past several years, Apple has made a concerted effort to be more transparent about the steps we are taking to protect the environment and make our business more sustainable. In this environmental update, I’d like to inform you of our recent progress and introduce you to a groundbreaking system of reporting that we believe is unmatched in our industry.”
This basically translates into… “we used to give a damn shit about environment … ! Hey, now we’re focusing on carbon footprint!, the rest … who cares?”
As for the rest of the world brands…. Uhh… analyzing what Coke, Microsoft or Ford do is not included in my agenda today.
Maybe another time.
See you @ Rennes
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