Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 192

8.1 Informational governance in the electronics industry
The global electronics industry is a notorious polluter. Several exam-
ples highlight the emergence of informational governance by envi-
ronmental NGOs in cleaning up this sector (Smith, Sonnenfeld and
Pellow, 2006 ).
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition has been one of the earliest
NGOs challenging the electronics industry to clean up. In various
campaigns, it was an early adopter of cutting-edge electronic tools,
such as the development of Internet-based interactive ecomaps doc-
umenting the pollution levels caused by the electronics industry in
Silicon Valley and the export of pollution globally.
In Taiwan, pollution of the electronics industry has been chal-
lenged by community-based monitoring systems. The community-
based Environmental Supervision Network trains local volunteers
to monitor high-tech pollution with the help of university schol-
ars. Villagers and farmers are trained to monitor pollution around
Hsinchu Science Park, following the lack of publicly available data
and information on emission and pollution levels (Chang et al.,
2006 ).
In the United States, the Computer Take Back Campaign (CTBC)
developed in 2001 a system of 'Computer Report Cards', which
scores electronic companies on a large number of environmental
criteria. Since then, these scorecards have been renewed regularly,
and the computer industry has been quite responsive to these infor-
mational campaigns. Several of the companies felt enough pressure
to take action and enter into negotiations with the CTBC. Wood and
Schneider ( 2006 ) report how this affected Dell, one of the market
leaders in personal computers.
More recently, in 2006, Greenpeace developed a Green Electron-
ics Guide, ranking the various electronics companies (especially
with respect to personal computers and cell phones) according to
the environmental friendliness of their products. This soon resulted
in companies such as Hewlett Packard and Dell making a commit-
ment to improve the environmental performance of their products
with respect to brominated flame retardants and PVC (http://www
.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/toxics/electronics/how-
the-companies-line-up).