Still, the Galaxy S8 earned a "gold" rating from the nonprofit Green Electronics Council under its Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) certification—the only meaningful environmental and sustainability certification for electronic products in the United States. "Extension of useful life"—meaning repair and refurbishment—is a key component of these standards because environmental experts agree that fixing a broken phone is much better for the Earth than buying a new one.

It's not easy to repair a Galaxy S8. Opening up Samsung's flagship phone requires heating the device to loosen the glue that holds it together and cutting and prying through that adhesive.

"It's crazy to me that phone got that rating," Mark Schaffer, who managed environmental programs at Dell and is now an independent electronics life cycle consultant, told me on the phone. "It's sad to me to see a brand new standard come out that's meant to show environmental leadership and see a phone like that get gold. It's too damn easy."

That the Galaxy S8 was able to earn the highest possible EPEAT rating confirmed what many involved in the actual development of those standards already knew: America's green electronics standards have been taken over by the most powerful gadget manufacturers in the world and have been watered down to the point where they are largely meaningless.

After seeing an early copy of Schaffer's report, I spoke to four other environmental experts who have spent years of their lives working on certification standards for every major type of electronics. All of them emphatically said that environmental progress has stalled because electronic companies have rigged the standards development process to the point where real progress is impossible; two of the people I spoke to have pulled their nonprofit organizations out of the process in protest. When a coalition of nonprofits, academics, and environmentalists attempted to use a different standards-making process for computer server standards, every major manufacturer boycotted the new system and forced a return to the old one.

Schaffer has been on every major EPEAT standards development board for the last 14 years, including the mobile phone certification standards development board. He's the author of a report released Thursday that claims electronics manufacturers including Samsung and Apple have "consistently opposed stronger reuse and repair criteria," turning EPEAT certifications into a "complicated way for manufacturers to greenwash products that have a devastating environmental impact and pat themselves on the back for business as usual." The report was released by Repair.org, a trade organization made up of small businesses that is fighting for "right to repair" laws in states around the country.

After that executive order, not being EPEAT certified could mean losing out in millions of dollars in government procurement contracts. Because certification suddenly mattered to their bottom line, electronics manufacturers had an incentive to not only attain gold status, but to make attaining gold status as easy as possible.

The standards do not have the force of law behind them—no manufacturer is required to get EPEAT certified. But the original EPEAT standards for computers were developed with the help of the Environmental Protection Agency, and President George W. Bush issued an executive order in 2007 mandating that 95 percent of all electronics purchased by the federal government be EPEAT certified.

"They've shifted the whole bar lower so that all of them or most of them can achieve gold status quite easy"

When it was released for laptops and desktop computers in 2006, just 60 products attained bronze or silver status. No product attained gold status. This was by design: "Gold was truly an aspiration driver for redesigning products," Sarah Westervelt, policy director of the e-Stewards electronic waste recycling standards (the strictest and most widely respected recycling standard in the US) and a longtime member of various EPEAT standards boards, told me.

Besides repairability, EPEAT standards—which exist for mobile phones, televisions, servers, desktop and laptop computers, and printers, copiers, and scanners—generally take into account things like recyclability, energy use, and use of conflict minerals.

Even Nancy Gillis, the CEO of the Green Electronics Council that administers EPEAT, told me that many of the EPEAT standards are outdated and that many of the standards no longer serve their initial function, which was to create environmental competition among companies. For example, nearly every new laptop that's released earns EPEAT's gold award. "It's EPEAT's publicly stated goal to have only a third of the products even be able to attain a bronze," Gillis told me. "But almost everything is gold now because the standards have been static."

"The IEEE-SA is committed to inclusivity. Everyone can join. Everyone can participate," a spokesperson for IEEE-SA told Motherboard in a statement. "We are open in membership, in participation and in governance—no matter your market around the world, your industry or the size of your company. Anyone is welcome to participate at any level."

In the case of IEEE-SA, there are five categories of stakeholder: "manufacturer," "other industry," public agency," "academia," and "general interest." These stakeholders are supposed to sit in a room, come up with the standards, and vote on them. But increasingly, representatives for the manufacturers are the ones who control much of the process. In IEEE-SA development, there are few limits to the number of people who can participate or vote in the process.

The EPEAT system is quite convoluted, but the quick version of how it works is like this: The Green Electronics Council invented and administers EPEAT, which is a set of standards. But the standards development process is not done by GEC. Instead, their development is overseen by standards development organizations, or SDOs, which themselves must be accredited by the American National Standards Institute. GEC uses three SDOs: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Standards Association (IEEE-SA), NSF International (unrelated to the National Science Foundation), and UL, a safety consulting and certification company. Each of those SDOs has its own process for how standards should be developed, but each SDO uses a consensus-based multi-stakeholder system.

"They've shifted the whole bar lower so that all of them or most of them can achieve gold status quite easy," Westervelt said.

"Members select their own category assignments. As a result, manufacturers often list members in the general interest category, as well as in the manufacturer category," Schaffer wrote.

That sounds good in theory, but people involved in the process told me that the open membership hasn't done much to stop manufacturer dominance of the standards development, and in fact has helped facilitate industry dominance as many manufacturers list their representatives as "other industry" and "general interest" members.

In theory, "manufacturers" are limited to having 50 percent of the vote. But there are few lines between "manufacturer," "other industry," and "general interest." On the EPEAT computer standard's public roster (available in the report), for instance, Apple, HP, and Lenovo have four members each and Dell has five members; Lockheed Martin has two "general interest" members, and Cisco, Blackberry, and Intel are considered "other industry." For the EPEAT server standard, however, Apple and Microsoft are considered "other industry," while Cisco is considered a manufacturer.

"While participants may represent the interests of their employers, individual members participate in the process and ballot as individuals, rather than as a corporate entity," IEEE-SA told me. "Each individual has one vote, or each entity has one vote—either way, the IEEE-SA is predicated on balance and fairness."

In procedural votes, "you sometimes have 20, 30 people voting for one company," Westervelt said. Total vote tallies vary, she and others on the committees told me, because there are different types of votes throughout the process—official votes on standards in the IEEE-SA process limit manufacturers to one vote, but votes during the process are less formal and so suggested standards can be killed before they move to this final vote.

"We can't move forward with a different standards process without having a balanced set of stakeholders. If some people don't want to play, our options are limited."

"They just have many more people at the table," Barbara Kyle, founder of the Electronics Takeback Coalition, which promotes green design, told me. "They have as many people at the table as they want and they have up to half the votes. And then there's industry groups that get some more votes. The people that represent the public have almost no votes."