Misses

Greenpeace’s green gadget rankings

A homely Asus monitor? A hideous cellphone from Samsung? Yawn.

Technically these gadgets are tops in their respective categories if you go by the eco-checklist, but realistically, they’re not exactly market leaders. By scoring products mostly on their green attributes in its latest green electronics survey (PDF) Greenpeace’s rankings marginalize an industry-wide effort to improve the way electronics are made and recycled. What’s more, without two of the consistently greenest electronic makers in the running — Apple and Philips didn’t participate — the results are severely skewed.

While it’s great to see more attention brought to the greening of the electronics industry, all of its major players must be accounted for.

CES as a virtual event? No.

Sure, the environmentalist in me isn’t too thrilled at the prospect of tens of thousands of attendees descending on Las Vegas on jet planes and automobiles, but trade shows like CES serve an important purpose. Despite the advances in teleconferencing and telepresence technologies, sometimes in business you have to bite the bullet, press the flesh and get some eyes- and hands-on time with the products you’re tasked with building a market for. That’s why complaints of CES’s web-event-unfriendly nature from virtual meeting startup ON24 ring hollow.

Granted, virtual meetings are a great way to save money and slash business travel costs and associated carbon emissions — in that respect, ON24 is right on the money. But for an event like CES, no amount of training a camera on your fancy new gadget will convince me to stock it on my store shelf, B&M or virtual. Energies are better spent in making in making CES as green an event as possible.

Green computing’s a no-show

This year, there was a disturbing lack of green computing solutions at CES. Perhaps it’s because the Green IT movement is doing a great job on the energy efficiency front, but it would have been nice to see the fruits of those efforts spill more forcefully onto the consumer market. One notable exception: TRENDnet’s GREENwifi, a wireless router that uses 50 percent less energy than conventional designs by adopting power-saving features similar to those of green routers (of the wired, Ethernet variety). And no, the avalanche of Android and Windows tablets don’t count (solely) as green computing.

What were your CES hits and misses? Sound off in the comments!