Courtesy Yahoo
Apple’s events typically lead off with a recitation of all the stuff the company has sold. But at Monday’s introduction of the iPhone SE and the 9.7-in. iPad Pro, the company started by talking about all the stuff it hasn’t used.
“We want to change the world for the better, and we think there’s no greater challenge in the world than our changing climate,” said Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environment, policy and social initiatives.
Jackson, who was an administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 2009 to 2013, spent the next eight minutes touting such recent Apple environmental achievements as powering 100 percent of its U.S. and Chinese offices and stores with renewable energy that puts no new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere to fuel global warming.
Worldwide, 93 percent of the Cupertino, Calif., company’s facilities runs on renewable energy — close to the 100 percent goal it set two years ago. Those figures, however, exclude the third-party manufacturing facilities that Apple relies on and which contributed 24.8 million metric tons of the 34.2-million metric ton carbon footprint the company reported for 2014.
Jackson’s presentation included such unexpected sights as a new 40-megawatt solar plant in China that accommodates grazing yaks underneath and a robot named Liam that dismantles old iPhones, one screw at a time. (Your own iPhone has already had nightmares about him.)
Not a new thing
It’s easy to read this outburst of public-spiritedness as another sign of a changing Apple under CEO Tim Cook.
But Steve Jobs first began talking up the company’s sustainability efforts in 2007, when he posted a letter (gone from Apple’s site, preserved at the Internet Archive) admitting that its habit of opacity had “left our customers, shareholders, employees and the industry in the dark.”
Three years later, Greenpeace — the environmentalist organization that had chastised Apple in 2007 for its apparent apathy, leading to Jobs’ letter — was holding up Apple as an example for competitors.
The rest of the industry has been busy, too. Google, for example, says its data centers use half as much electricity as typical facilities, while 37 percent of the company’s facilities run on renewable energy. It’s also invested in “moon shot” projects like Makani “energy kites” that would make wind power easier to generate.
Facebook, for its part, open-sourced its data centre power-conservation efforts under the Open Compute Project; you can look up real-time reports about the efficiency of its facilities at its Green on the Facebook page.
And Microsoft says its operations have been 100 percent carbon-neutral since June 2012. Last week, it announced its own new solar plant, a 20-megawatt facility in Remington, Va., to be built with Dominion Power.
These companies all have sound economic reasons to cut down on energy use: Data centres have large electric bills. Tighter packaging can yield major shipping cost savings. As Apple vice president Greg Joswiak told me at a 2010 briefing about new iPods: “You never want to ship air.”
What else could be done?
In some ways, Apple lags behind competitors in the greening of America. For example, Apple Maps remains woefully car-centric: Its limited transit navigation still doesn’t cover Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, and Seattle, among many other U.S. cities, and it doesn’t provide bicycling directions anywhere.
