The consumer electronics company said the Green Electronics Council, a group which wants to see manufacturers developing more "environmentally preferable electronic products," awarded five Toshiba laptops with the highest rating of approval. The five "Gold status" notebooks include all Portégé R400 and Portégé R500 configurations as well as the Tecra M9 with the product prefix of "PTM91" and two models of the Tecra A9 with the product prefixes of "PTS52" and "PTS53."

The three tiered Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool assess products over eight categories to determine their environmental friendliness, assigning point values so that Gold status "is awarded only to products that reach all 23 mandatory criteria and a minimum of 75 percent of the optional criteria." These categories include reduction/elimination of environmentally sensitive materials; materials selection; design for end-of-life; product longevity/life cycle extension; energy conservation; end-of-life management; corporate performance and packaging.

These same Toshiba laptops also meet the IEEE 1680-2006 standard and are RoHS-compatible. This is great to see laptops like this being so environmentally friendly. Just remember to recycle your notebook somehow when you find it time to move on - all of these standards mean nothing if your computer is rotting away in a landfill.

Today I've spent my computing day on Gmail, a little RSS reading and a small amount of document writing and editing. What I'm saying is that my whole day of productivity wouldn't have been that much different if I'd been operating on a computer with 128 MB RAM, a 10 GB hard drive and a 366 MHz processor.

Incidentally, I could pick up just such a machine for 100 bones from dataEvolution. But the thing that makes me want to throw a small, eco-friendly party is that it runs on 8 watts. Eight! That means you can count the watts on... two hands.

The box is Windows CE or Linux ready, but doesn't come with a preinstalled operating system. We've been seeing a lot of small, cheap, low-drain PCs these days, but this guy is the cheapest and lowest drain of the lot.

Via LifeHacker.

See Also:

-The Zonbu-
-The Linutop-
-The Shuttle-