Apple Aiming to Turn Greener in 2007

After being attacked by Greenpeace (mostly due to its exposure to the news network), and accused for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products and for not properly recycling its old products, Steve Jobs decided to publicly unveiled Apple’s current practices concerning its environment policies, while acknowledging that Apple did not communicate enough in this field.
After a short introduction, It is generally not Apple’s policy to trumpet our plans for the future; we tend to talk about the things we have just accomplished... So today we’re changing our policy., Steve jobs described the current programs developed by Apple to reduce or eliminate identified toxic chemicals from devices and manufacturing process while more aggressively recycle old products. While never citing directly Greenpeace, Steve Jobs went on and demonstrated how it is easy to biased the environment protection organization scorecard, illustrating why one should always looks further and not only concentrate on % or numbers. For a couple of points, Steve Jobs brings information and question which are surprisingly not covered by Greenpeace, and he took the European Union RoHS effective since July 2006 as a much better and reliable reference for scoring environmental friendly devices and manufacturing process:
- CRT are known to contain a huge amount of lead, and Apple completely eliminated the use of CRTs in mid-2006, while other manufacturers still offer such products (this point is ignored in Greenpeace scoring system).
- Apple products met both the spirit and letter of the RoHS restrictions on cadmium, hexavalent chromium and brominated flame retardants years before RoHS went into effect. This is true, and for product not RoHS-compliant, Apple simply removed them from the European AppleStore in June 2006 (such as the iSigh). Concerning brominated flame retardants, Greenpeace is mostly concentrating on the usage of TBBPA while the EU and the WHO consider this chemical as moderately toxic among its class (see here). PVC have been banned aggressively in EU since years mostly due to the chloridric acid released when eliminating PVC by burning and for their stability and long lifetime making PVC a dangerous polluting agent for the food chain.
- Apple is planning to introduce first displays using arsenic-free glass and LED backlight technology in 2007. If this is a good point, Apple also stated it will do its best to reduce and eventually eliminate the use of mercury by transitioning to LED backlighting for all displays when technically and economically feasible. So let's see how it will evolve, as Apple plans to completely eliminate the use of arsenic in all of its displays by the end of 2008.
- By 2010, Apple expects to recycle 30% of its branded products.
Importantly, Steve Jobs confirmed that all the e-waste collected in North America is processed in the U.S., and nothing is shipped overseas for disposal; indeed there is no interest to our point of view to collect large amount of e-waste for shipping them to Indonesia or India for being stored in inappropriate conditions leading to the pollution of water and air in the area. Indeed Greenpeace score system does not include such considerations.
So based on this information, which could be biased the same way as Greenpeace numbers are, we could expect to have a sub-notebook or a 13.3" MacBook Pro to be released before the end of the year.
Let's hope that Apple will keep communicating about its environment policies, and that the greener Apple does not have a bitter taste in the future as consumers and environment protection organizations will look closer at Apple concernign its practice in this field.