How Green Is Your Apple?
How green is your Apple? Well, not very, according to many in the industry we call technology, after pulling out of an environmental registry recently. it would seem that with passing of Steve Jobs, some of the ethics and ethos that made Apple such a ‘mega’ brand have also passed. Disappearing bit by bit are the ecological and environmental concerns which Job’s held dear. The latest in a string of incidents to beset the once wholesome image of Apple is the news that San Francisco city officials are banning local government agencies from buying Apple products, over the company pulling out of the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT).
Just last week EPEAT organizers announced that Apple was withdrawing all its products from the registry and would no longer submit new devices for them to be tested and receive ratings. "We regret that Apple will no longer be registering its products in EPEAT," they said. "We hope that they will decide to do so again at some point in future."
The news of Apple’s exit was greeted with a fair amount of speculation that government bodies, agencies and schools would stop buying Apple computers as a result, mainly because US government rules dictate that 95% of all electronics bought by official agencies must fall under EPEAT's scheme. Currently iPads and iPhones do not fall under the system's remit, however a change in the future has not been ruled out.
Officials for San Francisco city say the decision was in line with the long running policy to opt for equipment listed on the EPEAT registry. However they held out an arm of friendship to the electronics giant "San Francisco has reached out to Apple and is hopeful that a solution to this challenge can be found in the future," said their chief information officer Jon Walton.
Apple though are not likely to come back to the negotiating table, San Francisco is small fry to them, in 2010 city officials purchased $45,579 (£29,365) worth of Apple equipment, a very very tiny proportion of the $65bn Apple totaled in sales the same year. The only response so far from Apple has been a blanket and bland statement - "Apple takes a comprehensive approach to measuring our environmental impact and all of our products meet the strictest energy efficiency standards backed by the US government.
We also lead the industry by reporting each product's greenhouse gas emissions on our website, and Apple products are superior in other important environmental areas not measured by EPEAT, such as removal of toxic materials."Of course their decision to pull out of EPEAT would have had nothing to do with the fact the latest MacBook would have scored an appallingly bad rating on the registry. In recent tests, the latest MacBook Pro with its fancy, sharp Retina Display is Apple’s“least repairable laptop yet” because of the difficulty, ok alright, the pretty much impossibility of safely getting inside the device to upgrade or repair. It comes with RAM soldered to the logic board, a non-upgradeable SSD, a completely fused display, plus the lithium-polymer battery which is glued most strongly to the case, rather than affixed by screws or a less aggressively adhesive substance.
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