Environmental campaign body Greenpeace has once again slammed Nintendo for its policies on toxic chemicals and recycling.

In Greenpeace's latest Guide to Greener Electronics, which ranks the 18 top manufacturers of PCs, mobile phones, TVs and games consoles according to their policies on tackling environmental waste, Nintendo remains bottom of the pile, having been the first brand to score a zero out of ten when it was first included in the guide back in November 2007.

In the latest guide Nintendo scored eight zeros across nine categories related to the use of toxic chemicals and recycling. "Nintendo only gets 0.3 due to an indication that it does have a chemicals management policy," said Greenpeace, which urged the company to clean up its act by by eliminating hazardous substances in its products and recycling them responsibly once they become obsolete.

"Nintendo remains the odd one out of the 18 companies in the Guide, without any public timelines to eliminate the worst toxic chemicals or a global recycling policy for the millions of products it sells every year. If Nintendo has better policies why not make them public like the other 17 companies in the Guide?

"We have requested information from Nintendo head offices several times and sent it the ranking in advance but have received no response.

"Among Nintendo's competitors Microsoft [ranked sixteenth] improved its score to 4.7, mainly by bringing forwards its deadline to 2010 for eliminating toxic PVC and BFR's. Sony [ranked fourth] remains the leading console maker on 7.3, but it has yet to introduce any green innovation in the PlayStation."

You can read more about Greenpeace's efforts to get the hardware makers to tackle environmental waste on its Clash of the Consoles website.

Article supplied by Next Generation.

Mar 19, 2008