Apple Says Its Supply Chains and Products Will Be Carbon Neutral by 2030 (techcrunch.com) 26
Apple this morning announced plans to make its entire business carbon neutral within the next 10 years. The news follows the company's push toward a fully carbon neutral corporate structure, adding its manufacturing supply chain and resulting products into the mix. From a report: The roadmap to sustainability as released today, as part of the company's annual Environmental Progress Report. Reducing every device it sells to zero climate impact means a couple of things. The primary concern is finding ways to reduce emissions from productions by 75%. The remainder will be focused on efforts to help remove carbon from the atmosphere. The company has already begun pushing to make a larger percentage of its products from recycled materials, thanks in part to its own in house robots Dave and Daisy, which recover key rare earth magnets and tungsten, along with some steel recovery. The company also runs its own Material Recovery Lab in Austin, with help from engineers at Carnegie Mellon. Apple says it's working with more than 70 energy suppliers to go 100% renewable for its production centers, partnership it believes will reduce roughly the same amount of carbon emissions annually as three million cars. The company is also working to launch one of the world's biggest solar arrays in Europe. As far as the remaining 25% of carbon reduction, there are number of initiatives outlined in the report, including efforts to resort forests in Africa and South America.
Foreign policy (Score:2)
Certain governments could take some notes here, this is how you do foreign policy. China has already done a lot to reduce the footprint and pollution levels of its manufacturing in response to similar efforts from the EU such as RoHS rules.
If you want China to improve then this is a great use of "soft power". Apple should also stop using companies that are directly involved in human rights abuses.
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China is going full throttle with coal [wired.com]
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Most of them are being mothballed.
The central government gave responsibility for power to local governments. They hoped they could react faster. Unfortunately they built loads of coal plants that are now mothballed because they can't compete with cheaper renewables or meet demand for clean energy.
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Apple should also stop using companies that are directly involved in human rights abuses.
Which companies that are directly involved in human rights abuses should Apple stop using?
Slave Labor Free? (Score:2)
Let me know when they achieve that.
Unsustainable sustainability (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple buying up a large percentage of existing hydro power is just PR ... it won't diminish emissions, it will just shuffle them around a bit.
Unscabale renewables have fuck all to do with sustainability. They are just using their market leadership position to pay for slightly more expensive but unscalable renewable power, knowing that their competitors have too thin a margin to get into a bidding war for those resources with them. So it's cheap value signalling.
If they want to really make a difference then they could buy only scalable zero emission power ... but that would be fucking expensive obviously.
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You are missing the point. Of course it's not real, but it sure makes everyone feel better inside. That's part of the product experience.
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How much energy does their reality distortion field consume?
Re: Unsustainable sustainability (Score:2)
Use of the RDF actually reduces carbon! The more it's used the greater the effect!
Re:Unsustainable sustainability (Score:4, Informative)
Apple buying up a large percentage of existing hydro power is just PR ... it won't diminish emissions, it will just shuffle them around a bit.
1) Your fundamental premise is mistaken, at least in part. Apple has, for the last few years, powered 100% of their own global operations off renewable energy (i.e. not just using carbon credits or other offsets), and they've been putting more pressure every year on their suppliers to do the same, dropping suppliers who don't keep up. With that much demand, there hasn't been sufficient existing power to provide them what they're demanding, so where renewable energy hasn't been available, they've been partnering with energy providers to deploy new sources of renewable energy. The solar arrays they've been building around the world have become some of the largest deployments in each of the respective countries where they're operating, and if memory serves Apple has been sinking billions of dollars into making that happen.
2) Let's pretend that Apple wasn't helping to build new sources of energy. If we start from that assumption, it might be true that them buying up the existing hydro power does nothing in the short term except earn them some brownie points, but if Apple and others are buying up the supply of hydro, it encourages energy providers to provide more. Where there's demand, supply tends to grow to meet it.
3) There's been a lot more talk recently of taxing pollution instead of merely capping it or fining excesses. While it likely will not happen soon at a national level in the US (though it's already happening in some states), it seems like an eventuality in the not-too-distant future, and doing so would force companies to internalize a cost that has previously been externalized. Once that happens, the price of traditional energy sources will go up, increasing demand for lower cost energies such as the ones Apple is buying now.
4) Apple demanding large quantities of "clean" power today helps the industry work through the difficulties in doing large scale deployments so that they're able to hit the ground running tomorrow as more companies jump on that bandwagon. It may just be posturing today, but it helps set people up in the long-term for a better outcome.
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Others don't have the margins for it.
Large scale solar/wind deployments are easy ... and do nothing to solve the real problems with intermittent power. Even if Apple gets in the energy business and buys enough wind power such that there's always enough for them, selling the surplus at other times that's not a solution. The true price for the power when used at nation scale would be many times what they pay. Over-provisioning is not a solution at nation scale.
We don't need bandwagons, we need cheap TWh scale
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We don't need bandwagons, we need cheap TWh scale storage.
Or, instead of spending trillions on storage to fit the supply to the demand, we could use flex-pricing to fit the demand to the supply.
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TFA doesn't say anything about hydro power. It talks about new solar installations though.
In fact it says they want their supply chain to be carbon neutral, and most of it is in China and a long way from hydro installations. China has installed a vast amount of wind power and will continue to do so as long as there is demand.
How about we see what they actually do before accusing them of faking it?
Greenwashing (Score:3, Insightful)
What Apple doesnt say is that once their products have left the stores they effectively wipe their hands of any responsibility.
Meaning many of their products with planned obsolesence will likely end up in landfill. Apple can be described as many things
but one thing it does not foster is a "repair culture" . Apple products have received very poor "repairability" scores in recent years
they dont work well with non-apple hardware either. No , Apple go out of their way NOT to play with the competition.
Apple simply dont have the credientials to be called "Green" at this time.
Im sure the Fanboys wont question and parrot the lines anyway.
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so youre saying this is all lies?
https://www.apple.com/environm... [apple.com]
cw
Re:Greenwashing (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair what company making similar products has a good "repairability" score?
Making a product easy to repair comes at a cost of size/form factor (as it will need to make room for connections vs soldering it in place. General Reliability, Removable parts tend to get more wear, and sometimes gets loose.
Also if you fix it yourself chances are you are going to toss the broken part in the bin, vs the hassle of going via a proper electronics recycling.
I wouldn't relate repairability of a product with its total environmental impact, especially for a small product where a repair would replace a large percentage of the product. Perhaps 2-3 times over its life cycle which may be 1.5x longer than the normal product. Thus creating the same amount or more of waste.
China? (Score:2)
Do they mean ALL their supply chain? How are they planning on dictating the carbon footprint of suppliers in China?
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This is the first thing I thought of. Then I thought, maybe they're rebuilding their shit elsewhere, but I doubt it.
Japan seems to be though. [youtube.com]
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I would say yes.
China in some ways is in a better position going green for the future than the US is. In part it is due to the current levels of pollution in the Chinese cities. It is easier to be more environmental conscious when you can see the effect of pollution.
Apple being Apple, does have a large say to these companies on what they can and cannot do. Because they have a reputation of switching vendors and suppliers at a drop of a hat, if they don't get what they want. So if Supplier A cannot operat
Science says that will not matter. (Score:2)
It would seem that if they really cared Apple would get these changes implemented in the next year no matter the cost.
Sounds good, but there's a better real goal (Score:3)
They should be shooting for "garbage neutral" (allow devices to be repaired, create better life cycle chain so billions of their products like wireless ear buds don't end up floating in the ocean, etc.), then that'll be a real improvement.
Great! When will they be SLAVE labor Neutral????? (Score:1)
10 years? (Score:2)
In 10 years a lot of things can happen. Like Apple being split up or even been dismantled.