EPEAT Registry goes deep
The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) is
designed to make it easier for private- and public-sector
organizations to buy green electronic products.
With the tool, you can evaluate, compare and select monitors and
desktop and laptop computers based on their environmental
attributes.
The EPEAT Registry, at www.epeat.net, includes products that
their manufacturers say comply with the environmental performance
standard for electronic products, known as the Institute of
Electrical and Electronic Engineers 1680- 2006 standard. The
standard identifies 23 required criteria, such as the removal of
certain hazardous substances, and 28 optional criteria.
EPEAT operates a verification program to assure the credibility
of the registry.
EPEAT was developed as a project of the Zero Waste Alliance
between August 2002 and May 2006 under a grant from the
Environmental Protection Agency.
More than 109 million EPEAT-registered products were sold
worldwide in 2007, a 150 percent increase from 2006 sales and
amounting to 20 percent of all desktop PCs sold in the United
States.
The Federal Acquisition Regulation requires federal agencies to
purchase at least 95 percent of EPEATregistered products in all
relevant electronic product categories.
There are Bronze, Silver and Gold levels of registration under
EPEAT, said Holly Elwood, EPEAT lead at EPA.
Bronze products have met the required criteria, Silver products
have met the required criteria and 50 percent of the optional
criteria, and Gold products have met the required criteria and 75
percent of the optional criteria.
'If you go to the EPEAT Web site and click on the
registry, you can search by manufacturer category; you can choose
to search by category of products such as notebook, desktop,
monitors or by particular manufacturer,' Elwood said.
'You can click on Dell and search by Silver, for example,
and it will give you a list of all products Dell provides that are
EPEAT Silver-registered today.'
A buyer can see all of the information in detail about the
product, such as all criteria listed and how many points the
product achieved in each of the eight environmental performances
that are a part of the standard, she said.
'It is important to note that this is a tool that everyone
can access now,' Elwood said.