Last week, Tom Lauria, Vice President, Communications for the International Bottled Water Association commented on a post at ecopreneurist.com about greenwash happening over at Nestle Waters where he accused me of being an anti-corporate type that hides behind ’saving the earth’ to bash businesses because I hate capitalism. My sense is that many companies do not think there is any valid way to criticize green claims made by companies without being anti-corporate and anti-capitalist. But now with Dell jumping in the game, the gloves are off. I'm hoping the greenwash police win!

http://ecopreneurist.com/2008/12/23/dell-vs-apple-the-corporate-greenwas...

I found Dell's blog entry interesting because it is rare for tech companies to criticize each other's greenness. That has been the realm of Greenpeace and other NGOs. It adds quite a different timbre to the game if the tech players will point fingers at each other for their environmental friendliness, or lack thereof.

Apple has this idea in mind, stretch the truth, word things in such a way as to confuse the consumer into thinking something good about apple, that may not be 100% true. In the green ad, apple points out that it's the greenist family of "macbooks" and that it doesnt use harmful chemicals like you'd find in most computers. What they leave out is the fact it's the greenist family on laptops "mac" has ever made, and not compared to other laptop makers. Also that the harmful chemicals in most computers in in refernce to computers that people already have in they're homes, and not the new computers that are now hitting the market. It's plain old spin, even the people at apple have been quoted saying "People who take our ads at face value are fools". Working in a place that sells PC and mac computers, I can say most apple customers take these ads at face value. But Apple doesnt have the stigma of big bad microsoft, and I have a feeling apple will milk this whole "Apple is the lil innocent company" for as long as it can push up they're sales. Not that any green company would ever build a device where you cant remove the battery, or ship computers as a box inside a box, inside a box, as apple does.