Greenpeace CES Tour Wraps With HP Love, Samsung Called Out

Environmental watchdog group Greenpeace, which earlier this week debuted its latest Guide to Greener Electronics ratings, has been on the Consumer Electronics Show floor this week exploring some of the green tech being showcased and noting “a trend towards greener electronics”. They’ve just announced their own version of green tech awards, giving HP top honors and Samsung the bottom of the food chain.

The step towards giving HP best marks, Greenpeace says, comes months after an eco-activist action in which members of the non-profit “painted a huge sign that said ‘Hazardous Products’ on the roof of HP headquarters to send a strong message.” Greenpeace noted that HP pressed no charges that day and, in fact, “HP changed its plans and acted quickly to remove toxic substances.” Fast forward to this now closing CES event and we see introduction of the HP Compaq 8000f Elite Ultra Slim Desktop PC, which is “the industry’s first Microsoft Windows based desktop to be free of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from the wall to the mouse.” Greenpeace seems to have been quite impressed by this desktop PC.

Samsung, by contrast, seems to have drawn Greenpeace’s wrath. It felt the consumer electronics manufacturer was trailing “behind industry leaders like Apple and Sony by not following through on its promised phase-out of toxic chemicals in its products.” Greenpeace noted, thus far, only Samsung’s latest mobile phones seemed free of toxic substances. It says that the company has set “January 2011 as the deadline for eliminating them from new models of its notebooks and still has no definitive timeline for removing them from its TVs and household appliances.”

Samsung, for its part, notes through at least a few CES announcements it has released a couple of new items besides mobile phones which it says are more eco-friendly.