Occupying third place, IBM is the only US computer company ranked by an environmental action group in the top five for environmental management attributes. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition rated 28 name-brand manufacturers and retailers of desktop and laptop machines, monitors, or printers. Scores are given for policies toward eliminating hazardous materials from the products, willingness to take back and reprocess used equipment, and monitoring and reporting of occupational illnesses and injuries. The companies can earn extra points by making it very easy to find environmental information online.

The coalition, which was founded in 1982 alongside the emergent personal computer industry in California, USA, conducts the survey annually. Its rating is based strictly on information provided on corporate Web sites.

The other leaders are from Japan: Canon, Toshiba, Fujitsu, and Sony. Daewoo and Lucky Goldstar from South Korea, e-Machines from the US, and AST from Taiwan are in the basement. They earn nothing, receiving no points at all on 17 questions, each marked on a sliding scale of 0 to 4 (thus allowing a maximum score of 68). The report is on the SVTC Website.

Since the grades flow from the underlying corporate communications and disclosure policies, not necessarily on the actual performance of the companies, and since the marks are only for practices in the US, the rankings are far from a definitive picture of the businesses' international environmental management acumen. The Dutch firm Philips, for example, is a worldwide leader in the application of lifecycle assessment and dominant in the use of design-for-environment principles to inspire its manufacturing processes. But Philips scores just 9 points on the coalition's report card, tied with Gateway, a US firm with an undistinguished record in environmental affairs.

To a large extent, the coalition, and the other advocacy groups that release the survey, skew the grading method intentionally to reveal the widening chasm that characterizes standards for the production of electronic equipment and waste management in different countries. Over the past several years, most of the innovative, sometimes radical approaches have originated in consulting firms, think-tanks, and government agencies in Europe and Japan.