Amsterdam, Netherlands-based environmental NGO, Greenpeace, has come out with the 2016 edition of its annual ‘Clicking Clean’ report that ranks the greenest tech companies from around the world based on their efforts to move away from traditional fossil fuels and switch over to renewable sources of energy. The report, named ‘Clicking Clean: Who is Winning the Race to Build a Green Internet?’, was published earlier today, and ranks a number of the largest and most widely-known technology companies, praising some for their efforts at building a greener future, while admonishing others for their lackadaisical approach towards environmental issues. For the first time this year, the report has included a number of China-based tech companies such as, Tencent, Baidu, Alibaba and Naver, as they continue to expand their operations around the world. However, with fossil fuels continuing to rule the roost in their home country, these companies mostly lag behind their U.S. counterparts in the green charts.
According to the list, a privately-held Las Vegas firm called Switch takes the top spot, getting straight ‘A’s across all categories. The company provides cloud services and data-center solutions to the enterprise, and reportedly gets all its energy needs from renewable sources, making it a clear winner among its peers. Among the larger, consumer-oriented companies, Apple takes the top slot for the third year in a row, scoring 83% on Greenpeace’s Clean Energy Index. Facebook and Google also does reasonably well, scoring 67% and 56% respectively. While all these tech giants have taken significant steps towards making their operations more environment-friendly, there’s still apparently a long way to go, as is evident from the scores.
Some of the notable companies that are not doing so well, though, are Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle, all three of whom have a long way to go catch up with the leaders. While Microsoft managed to get 32% on Greenpeace’s Clean Energy Index, Amazon scored 17%, while Oracle ended up with just 8%. Greenpeace has also revealed that the IT industry’s appetite for electricity is only expected to rise in the coming years as global internet traffic continues to rise. That being the case, the industry is expected to account for over 12% of the global electricity usage by the end of this year. With companies like Google and Apple already taking major steps to reduce their energy footprints in the future, it will be interesting to see how the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Oracle respond.