The Greenpeace Cool IT Leaderboard assesses the external impacts and internal efforts of 21 global IT companies to mitigate climate change. While the list has grown, several major companies like Apple and Facebook are absent. The Leaderboard originally took the unique approach of identifying by name each company's chief executive in its listings, but backed off in April 2010. Several years of improvements vanished in 2012, largely due to weak scores for political advocacy. Scores continue to be low in 2012, although most companies did improve.

ICT companies appear to be boosting their use of renewable energy. Indicators include the Vestas 2012 Corporate Renewable Energy Index (CREX) and Apple's recent announcement about progress toward its 100% renewable goal.

ICT companies are again well represented among the Fortune 500 locations participating in the EPA Green Power Partnership.

A number of sustainability rankings in the US and Europe let us take a look at how telecom providers perform compared to each other and to broader tech sectors. Vodafone is the top global performer; Sprint-Nextel is tops in the United States. Sprint was rank tops in the US for its take-back program.

We've often noted how different sustainability rating yield different results. That's why we make the effort to contrast them in visual formats like the table below, comparing recent Computerworld and Newsweek rankings. The two agree on Fujitsu and HP, but don't always converge after that.

ICT businesses continue to dominate Newsweek's 2011 Green Rankings of the top 500 US public companies, as they did in 2010* and 2009**. Four of the five top 5 companies are in the ICT sectors: IBM (#1), Hewlett-Packard (#2), Sprint (#3), and Dell (#5). All told, ICT sectors dominated the top 20 with 11 positions.

CME Group Index Services publishes the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes. Which ICT companies perform best on the 2011 Indexes?

A coalition of Chinese NGOs allied with the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE) periodically ranks tech companies on their environmental and human rights performance in China. The fourth such ranking contains some surprises.

"The Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations in the World is an annual project initiated by Corporate Knights, the magazine for clean capitalism…with three strategic partners to identify…the global corporations which have been most proactive in managing environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.  Launched in 2005, the annual Global 100 is announced each year during the World Economic Forum in Davos." ICT companies do not populate the top of this list like they do some others.

Newsweek has released its Green Rankings 2009. It provides a rank for each the 500 largest US companies and a "Green Score" normalized to a 100-1 scale. How did companies in industries of interest stack up?