The United States Environmental Protection Agency's Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) Electronics Challenge "encourages electronics manufacturers, brand owners and retailers to strive to send 100 percent of the used electronics they collect from the public, businesses and within their own organizations to third-party certified electronics refurbishers and recyclers." ICT companies have performed well in the Challenge. Dell, LG, Samsung all received top recognition.

Three of 2017's Gold Tier winners were ICT companies: Dell, Samsung and Xerox . Previous Gold winner LG fell to Silver, along with Vizio. Sony was a Bronze. It was disappointing to see any fewer ICT companies achieve Gold Tier status in 2017.

ICT companies also were recognized with two of the three Champion Awards.

LG's Product award is detailed in our Finding the Greenest Televisions post.

Samsung's Cutting Edge award is detailed in our Finding the Greenest Mobile Phones post.

Dell's Cutting Edge Honorable Mention is detailed in our Greener Packaging for ICT Gear post.

2016 Awards

Four of 2016's Gold Tier winners were ICT companies: Dell, LG, Samsung and Sprint. It was disappointing not to see any more ICT companies achieve Gold Tier status in 2016.

ICT companies also were recognized with two of the three Champion Awards.

Dell won the Product award for "...the use of post-industrial recycled (PIR) carbon filled polycarbonate in the Latitude E7450 laptop, the first laptop to use this material. By using PIR material, it has kept 170,000 pounds of carbon fiber from being landfilled in 2015."

Samsung's Cutting Edge award is citied in our Finding the Greenest Televisions post.

2015 Awards

Four out of 2015's Gold Tier winners were ICT companies: Dell, LG, Samsung and Sprint.

ICT companies also were recognized with two of the three Champion Awards.

Dell won the Non-Product award for "...its development of a closed loop program that uses plastics recovered from the Dell Reconnect recycling partnership with Goodwill in the U.S. to make new computers through the company’s manufacturing partner, Wistron...By closing the loop for plastics, Dell achieved the following environmental benefits in 2014: Avoided 198,776 kilograms of CO2 equivalent or about 500,000 miles driven by an average passenger car; Reused 2.89 million pounds of materials taken from the e-waste stream; Collected 230.9 million pounds of used electronics from residential and business programs globally..."

Samsung's Product award is citied in our Finding the Greenest Mobile Phones post.