Tech companies going eco-friendly with products

LONDON - Technology majors are going eco-friendly, and it is finally changing what they produce.

When Newsweek magazine compiled its annual Green Rankings for 2010, three of the global top five companies were technology giants IBM, HP and Sony.

Placed at one, two and four respectively, they were closely followed by Deutsche Telekom, Toshiba, Vodafone and Nokia, reports the Daily Telegraph.

If real proof was needed that giant corporations have made a real commitment to a new way of working, this is it. Accusations of “greenwash” are difficult to sustain in the face of multibillion-pound commitments, the report said.

For consumers, however, there are some even more noticeable differences: Dell, which by some measures is the greenest company in the US, uses bamboo packaging.

Apple, which does not usually submit its processes to rankings for such league tables, has whittled down the packaging for its products to a fraction of what it once was.

Intel has worked to make sure its processors deliver the same performance without using halogen or lead.

Like Google, however, many of these companies are keen to present environmental awareness as being about both economics and conscience: a calculator on Dell’s website, for instance, claims that about 30 pounds of its customers’ money is saved every second by its green technology.

Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American billionaire who made his fortune with computer company Sun Microsystems, now has a $1 billion venture capital fund that is investing in green companies.

He told Newsweek that each had a 90 percent chance of failure, but the fact that its technologies such as battery improvements that are attracting Khosla’s attention indicate that such green aims could potentially benefit all consumers, from those with electric cars to anybody with a smartphone.