There's no getting around it: Televisions are rough on the environment. They're built with heavy metals and toxic chemicals. They produce an average of 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per household per year, based on the Environmental Protection Agency's estimates. And they burn energy even when they're turned off. That's quite an impact for a quintessentially non-essential gadget.
The good news is that technological advances are allowing manufacturers to produce TVs that are simultaneously more pleasing to the eye and to the planet than ever before.
Finding the eco-friendly (or the least eco-hostile) TVs can still be tricky. Statistics on power consumption are available if you look for them (CNET maintains a helpful database), but they aren't typically flaunted. Even when "eco-friendliness" is advertised, it might just be a case of subtle greenwashing.
The Energy Star sticker is theoretically a good starting point in the search for a green TV. But as of March 16, more than 1,100 HDTVs are Energy Star 3.0 compliant. That's way too many TVs for the designation to be meaningful. Thankfully the newest Energy Star standard (version 4.0) takes effect on May 1 and is much more discerning. For example, a 42-inch HDTV must be 45% more efficient to be compliant under the new standards.
Generally speaking the most environmentally friendly TVs are LED-backlit LCD sets (I'll just call them LED TVs from here on out). They're far more energy efficient than plasma or conventional LCD sets, which both use fluorescent lights. Fluorescent lamps release about 80% of their energy as heat, according to the Energy Star Web site, so a huge amount of power is wasted. A well-built LED is much more efficient and should be mostly cool to the touch.
LEDs are also free of mercury, a toxic metal used in all fluorescent lights. So when it's time to pitch (or preferably, recycle) your LED TV, hopefully many years down the line, it'll create less toxic waste than a conventional LCD or plasma.
If the low operating cost and eco-friendliness haven't convinced you to go LED, the wow-factor of the TVs themselves should. They can be literally pencil-thin, and the picture quality is almost always more vibrant than a conventional LCD. No other display type can touch the picture quality of a plasma, but it's common for a plasma to consume four times as much energy as an LED in a year, and sometimes as much as a refrigerator, according to some estimates.
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