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Earth Apple

Apple is Cleaning Up Its Most Challenging Carbon Emissions (protocol.com) 12

On Thursday, it announced it's taking some big steps to address some of the emissions associated with making and using those products by investing in a solar farm going up in Texas and cleaning up its supply chain. From a report: Apple is tackling part of its Scope 3 emissions. The biggest challenge for nearly any company is addressing carbon pollution from the manufacturing and use of its products. And Apple has a lot of products in circulation. The company has a mind-bending 1.8 billion devices currently in service around the world. If they were evenly distributed (spoiler: they're not), roughly a quarter of the world's population would own an Apple device. For those Apple devices to be useful, they need to be charged. I mean, duh. By the company's own carbon accounting, all that charging is responsible for nearly 22% of Apple's carbon footprint. Manufacturing all those devices is an even bigger chunk of emissions, accounting for more than 70% of its 22.6 million ton carbon footprint, according to its most recent environmental progress report.
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Apple is Cleaning Up Its Most Challenging Carbon Emissions

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  • by oldgraybeard ( 2939809 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @03:21PM (#62447568)
    Wonder who they are buying the carbon offsets from. That is how it's done when you have problems seeing over your piles of cash.
    • Wonder who they are buying the carbon offsets from. That is how it's done when you have problems seeing over your piles of cash.

      Radian in Brown County https://www.apple.com/newsroom... [apple.com]

    • That's how they used to do it, sure, but they've been running 100% of their data centers, retail locations, and other operations using renewable energy since 2018. They still use carbon offsets in other environmental claims they make, such as in how they deal with emissions from other sources (e.g. concrete used in buildings), but they stopped relying on offsets in their renewable energy claims a long time ago. Better yet, they're making their supply chain do the same by the end of the decade, with vaguely

  • Look the other way (Score:4, Insightful)

    by suss ( 158993 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @04:04PM (#62447740)

    Don't look at what the real manufacturing in China is causing, here's some solar panels in Texas! We're good now, right? Everything's green, Apple green...

    • by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @05:48AM (#62449006)

      All of Apple’s own global operations, including retail, are already 100% on renewables (i.e. not just carbon offsets or the like), and have been for a few years already. They committed roughly a year ago to their entire supply chain doing the same by 2030, and I saw a headline roll by a few days ago saying that clean energy usage in their supply chain had doubled in the last year alone.

      For all their faults in related areas (e.g. not making their devices repairable), renewable energy is one area where they’re actually doing a world-class, industry-leading sort of job.

  • by Austerity Empowers ( 669817 ) on Thursday April 14, 2022 @04:19PM (#62447766)

    I heard they are making their employees return to work. Apparently their carbon emissions record doesn't include all the gas cars being used to senselessly travel to an office. Maybe if their emissions did include this, they'd make smarter decisions.

We're here to give you a computer, not a religion. - attributed to Bob Pariseau, at the introduction of the Amiga

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