Apple far from green, fumes Greenpeace

Environmental activist group Greenpeace ranked Apple at the bottom of its latest "Green Ranking" report while praising Lenovo for recent improvements.

The Greenpeace programme looks at both recycling and toxic content policies for various electronics manufacturers.

Lenovo was ranked last in August and Apple ranked 11th out of 14 vendors in August and sank to the bottom spot in December.

Greenpeace praised Lenovo's for its recycling policies, particularly its practice of reporting the amount of recycled equipment as a percentage of total sales.

Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Dell, and Samsung rounded out the top five performers in the rankings.

Greenpeace complained that Apple failed to make any progress whatsoever since the rankings were first released.

Greenpeace in a separate campaign is rallying consumers to lobby the company to ban the use of certain toxic chemicals such as brominated flame retardants and hexavalent chromium. The pressure group also wants Apple to beef up its recycling program.

Apple on a company says that brominated flame retardants and hexavalent chromium are "restricted" but not banned.

Apple sharply denied Greenpeace's assessment that the company is not environmentally friendly.

"We disagree with Greenpeace's rating and the criteria they chose," a company spokesperson said.

"Apple has a strong environmental track record and has lead the industry in restricting and banning toxic substances."

The spokesperson pointed to the Green Electronic Council's EPEAT ranking, which places Apple's iMac, MacPro, and MacBook computers and monitors at or near the top in its list of eco-friendly computers.

The EPEAT test uses IEEE environmental standards to index the amount of toxic materials in the device as well as the amount of recyclable materials and the way that disposal of a device is handled.