I’m writing this on a three and a half year old Mac PowerBook. Us Mac users are notoriously sanctimonious and, often, downright snooty when it comes to our IT, so it came as a bit of a shock when Greenpeace launched a campaign against Apple for coming bottom in their scorecard of electronics companies for the second year running (see graphic).

Apple’s brilliant, but notoriously brittle, CEO Steve Jobs reacted dismissively to the campaign at first, but something must have sunk in as he has now launched an impassioned defence of Apple’s record, trailed on the front page of their website last month. The most significant part is a pledge to phase out some of the more controversial chemicals in its product range, such as Brominated Fire Retardants (BFRs) and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC), by 2008 – other computer manufactures have pledged to phase them out by 2009.

So I can go back to being smug about my Mac…