The EPEAT Gold database includes 389 models for the US. This represents a drop of ~30% over a year ago. The biggest drops came from Toshiba (-47%) and Samsung (-76%), the companies that offer the most models a year ago. Toshiba is still a model count leader, along with HP and Apple. The latter two companies increased their models counts in the past year.

Model counts are an imperfect way of tracking progress, but these are big swings. It is not clear why there has been such a drop in EPEAT Gold notebooks. It could be as simple as product line rationalization or as complicated as the lobbying effort against EPEAT purchasing. The incorporation of stronger Energy Star standards in 2014 may also have down-rated models that were formally Gold.

The number of models TCO offered under Sweden's TCO Development standards increased 43% over the same period to 120 models. ASUS and MLS registered their first products during this period. Lenovo and Samsung offer the most models, as they did last year. There was no decline in Samsung's TCO models as there was for its EPEAT models.

[1] These products are certified under the latest standard, TCO Certified Notebooks 4. No product met the higher TCO Certified Edge standard. TCO certification includes social as well as environmental criteria. TCO claimed in February 2014 that Apple declined to participate.

[2] Click here to learn more about correctly using the EPEAT database, finding EPEAT Gold products in other countries, and the limits of the EPEAT standard.

Samsung's NP-NC215S solar-powered notebook won a Eco-Design and Sustainable Technologies award at CES 2012.