Underscoring how young the green computing movement is, Earth Techling has a great interview with EPEAT’s Director of Outreach and Communications, Sarah O’Brien, about the organization’s publication of its fifth annual report.

O’Brien shares a nice anecdote about how far EPEAT’s come.

Well, in our first year no products could meet the gold level. Leading companies like Apple, HP, Dell and others competed to get to that level and to be the first. That was a good measure that the standards were challenging enough for manufacturers to drive them to create better products. And now we have over 1,100 gold rated products on our list.

EPEAT, which stands for Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool, ranks electronics according to several criteria including energy efficiency, recyclability and several other environmental factors. It has a huge impact on IT buying and governs, in large part, how federal agencies get their computers. Needless to say, for the feds to dispose of an enormous amount of computers each month (10,000 PCs!), it has to literally buy tons of replacements. Thanks to EPEAT, those replacements are greener.

It’s also had a big impact on consumer PCs. If you bought a MacBook Pro recently, you’re the owner of an EPEAT Gold notebook. Other huge PC makers including Dell and HP, also offer a broad range of EPEAT Gold (EPEAT’s top tier) of desktops, notebooks and monitors, making it easier to bring some Green IT benefits home.

So, hurray to EPEAT! Here’s to many more years.

Update: Download the EPEAT 2010 Environmental Benefits Report here (PDF) for more fascinating facts like…

EPEAT continues to play a significant role in the notebook market, with EPEAT
registered products constituting more than 72% of notebooks sold in the US and
over 30% of notebook sales worldwide. ( Page 8 )

Thanks Sarah!