Issues with the Energy Star Label

On the Green Show this week, we wrap up results from the Solar Decathlon, find out what percentage of consumers would purchase a green phone, and talk about why you can't always trust the Energy Star label.

Mark: Hey, I'm Mark Licea. And this week, we wrap up the solar decathlon. We’ll tell you what percentage of consumer say, yes to green phones. Why you can't trust energy star? The Green Show starts now. Last week we showed you team Germany’s home out of the solar decathlon, turns out they took first place. Mark LaMonica has a quick wrap up. Mark2: I'm in Washington DC, in the national mall at the solar decathlon. It’s a competition between 20 colleges to build the best solar home. This year, we’re seeing some new technologies including building integrated portable tiles, where there are solar cells built in to the sidings of the house, LED lighting, and many of the homes had energy monitors that let people control and track how much electricity they use in their home. This year’s winner was team Germany, which built a house with solar cells on the roof and on the side. Altogether, it was able to produce about two times electricity of the house needs. Mark: Moving right along, out of a recent survey, 40% of all US consumers would consider buying green cell phone. Of course it’s not that simple. Consumers also want the price, performance, and features to match other non-green phones. The pole of American adults carried out by ABI research shows that only 4% of consumers even know about green phones. It also shows that paying extra for an ecofriendly phone does not score highly. Only 7% said they would. Although green phones don’t seem to differ too much in price, the Samsung Reclaim was release earlier in August, and that sells for $50 with a two year contract. We also got a hold of Samsung’s first full touch ecofriendly phone, The Blue Earth. Kent Germann has more. Kent: Thanks Mark, this is it. This is the Samsung Blue Earth. This takes ecofriendly phones to a whole new level. Not only does it made out of 100% recycled materials. Supposedly plastic water bottles that they the fashion out of. It’s also free of any harmful material that you might find in other phones. And it has solar panels on the back. Now the phone does have a normal charger. So it’s one of which you're going to use primarily, but the solar panels can help when you're in standby mode or you just have the phone out in a sunny place and it can just back it up for some extra juice when you need it. It also has a lot of adjustments for the screen brightness and the backlighting time because that always sucks up a lot of battery life. And the phone’s box is made out of 100% recycled material. So this cardboard, it doesn’t have any plastic part that you might find on a normal cell phone box. And actually, Samsung does even say, that you can use certain aspects of the box again. So you could take this thing right here that the phone sits in. and they say that you can use it as a picture frame. Not sure that you want to, but the option is there. This is the Samsung Blue Earth, one of the most ecofriendly phones we've seen especially with those solar panels. I'm Kent Germann with The Green Show and the Samsung Blue Earth. Mark: If you’ve made an effort to seek out energy star products to save power, you might want to sit down for this news. An internal audit by the energy department found that some energy star labeled products are not as efficient as they claimed. The New York Times says that the two agencies responsible of energy star, which are the department of energy and the EPA had not been fully enforcing their standards. Some manufacturers of refrigerators and air conditioners are phoning it in by certifying products themselves. Now the DOE says it has to crack down on cheaters and rework guidelines for new products. We can't trust the energy star label, then who can we trust? Fortunately, Cnet does run power consumption test for TVs, PCs, and monitors. We’ll try not to let you down. That’s it for this week, send your feedback to greenshow@cnet.com. I'm Mark Licea. Thanks for watching.