It’s not Iowa political news, but since all of us here use computers, I thought this Greenpeace campaign would be of interest to the community.

Greenpeace has been ranking mobile and personal computer manufacturers on “on their global policies and practice on eliminating harmful chemicals and on taking responsibility for their products once they are discarded by consumers.”

Click through to read more details about the criteria Greenpeace uses for their rankings. The idea is to get the corporations to remove the most toxic chemicals, such as PVC, from their products:

Substituting harmful chemicals in the production of electronics will prevent worker exposure to these substances and contamination of communities that neighbor production facilities. Eliminating harmful substances will also prevent leaching/off-gassing of chemicals like brominated flame retardants (BFR) during use, and enable electronic scrap to be safely recycled. The presence of toxic substances in electronics perpetuates the toxic cycle – during reprocessing of electronic waste and by using contaminated secondary materials to make new products.

After hearing from 20,000 people, Apple became the first company to respond to the Greenpeace campaign, announcing plans this week to produce a “greener” Apple:

Apple has declared a phase out of the worst chemicals in its product range, Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) by 2008. That beats Dell and other computer manufacturer’s pledge to phase them out by 2009.

Click through for more information; Apple could still do much more to promote recycling of the company’s products, especially outside the U.S.

If you want to join this Powerbook user in taking action on this issue, or if you want to learn more about Greenpeace’s online campaigns, click here.