• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, January 8, 2010

Greenpeace released its Quarterly Guide to Greener Electronics with Microsoft and Nintendo battling it out for last place. Brands may not care much about the January 2010 rankings released Thursday. Well, not unless the marketing or advertising campaign done in partnership with one of the companies in the ranking targets environmentally-minded consumers.

Several companies surveyed by Greenpeace fell in rankings this quarter, such as Samsung and Sharp. Greenpeace drops Samsung from second place to seventh place for failing to eliminate BFRs in all its products by January 2010.

Samsung, along with Dell and Lenovo picked up penalty points in the guide for failing to follow through on phasing out toxins in their products.

With only its latest models of mobile phones free of toxic substances, Samsung has set January 2011 as the deadline for eliminating them from new models of its notebooks and still has no definitive timeline for removing them from its TVs and household appliances, according to Greenpeace.

Samsung did so poorly that Greenpeace has called them out in a petition on Twitter @Samsungtweets in an effort to bring awareness about eliminating harmful chemicals like PVC.

Microsoft and Nintendo continue to languish at the bottom of the ranking. Nintendo was the only company on the list to score "bad" or "partially bad" in every category. Greenpeace judges companies on a variety of criteria, including chemical management, use of PVC, carbon footprint disclosure, use of renewable energy, energy efficiency, and amount of recycling.

Apple advances the rankings by 0.2 from the previous 4.9 ranking, earning four gold stars for eliminating hazardous substances in its product line. In September 2009, the company tried to appease Greenpeace and flash them an environmental side by revamping that portion of its Web site, adding more data in regards to its efforts.

Hewlett-Packard also did well, but mobile phone maker Nokia has earned the distinction of remaining the greenest manufacturer. The company maintained its top ranking in the report, despite taking a slight point reduction for failing to lobby on behalf of the revised Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive, according to Greenpeace.