Cebit, Europe's largest trade show, is all about the latest products but there's one corner of the fair where products from ten or twenty years ago are on display. It's not a computer history exhibition but electronic waste, brought to the show by Greenpeace to illustrate the problem of disposing of used IT products.

PETER SAYER, IDG News Service:
You've brought a container of e-waste to Cebit. Why?

AL HAJJ, Greenpeace International
To show the behind-the-scenes reality of the glossy, shiny product and to remind that it's not all beautiful and sexy. There is a reality on the ground that all this e-waste being generated, up to 20-50 million tons per year, are ending up in somebody else's back yard contaninating it.

Electronic waste often ends up in places like China where this video was taken. There workers dismantle products by hand putting themselves into contact with toxic chemicals. The chemicals also contaminate the soil and enter ground water.

To reduce the harm done, the group wants manufacturers to reduce the amount of waste from products, and to make that waste less toxic, by making products that use less energy, choosing environmentally friendly components and materials, making them longer-lasting, and designing products that can easily be recycled.

The study "Searching for green electronics" is a snapshot of some products available on the market late last year. Greenpeace invited PC and phone manufacturers to provide information about their most environmentally friendly notebooks, desktop PCs, mobile phones, PDAs and game consoles. They then evaluated the products on four criteria: use of toxic chemicals, energy efficiency, recyclability and marketing.

Of the companies approached, 14 replied, providing information on 37 products. Some of those contacted, including Acer, Apple, Asus, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sharp, did not respond, or replied too late meaning their products were excluded from the report.

Top ranks went to Sony Ericsson's T650i cell phone but that only scored 5.3 out of 10 so there's lots of room for improvement. In the laptop category, the Sony Vaio TZ11 led with 5.29 points out of 10.

With this report we were aiming to asses whether the industry was acting on its comitment to-go green. There is a lot of talk in the industy about going green so we wanted to see if there really are green products on the market. We don't have a winner, we don't have the green product that we are all very happy about but we have seen steps and the report does show that there are certain prod

At Cebit 2008 in Hanover Germany this is Martyn Williams, IDG News Service.