Apple Releases the Details of its Carbon Footprint

For a company with a hippie-influenced CEO famous for a six month sojourn in India in the early 1970s and widely reported to have had major personal revelations after dropping acid, Apple hasn’t had much of an environmental image over the years. Despite Al Gore’s presence on the company board, Apple didn’t perform free computer recycling until April 2006, far later than Dell and HP.

Apple’s reluctant environmental attitude has been changing, however. Steve Jobs personally made it clear in May 2007 that he intended to change all of that in a letter to the public that temporarily appeased Greenpeace. And now, the company is the first in the industry to provide full disclosure of its carbon footprint.

Anyone can look behind the curtain at Apple.com/environment. It’s pretty amazing. The first thing that jumps out at you is that Apple claims that it is responsible for pumping 10.2 million tons of carbon emissions into the atmosphere every year. That exceeds HP’s 8.4 million tons and dwarfs Dell’s 471,000. That would be horrifying, were it not for the fact that both HP and Dell specifically exclude the carbon impact of people using their products (and some manufacturing impact), which Apple says is 53 percent of its total.

The other major contributor, not surprisingly, is manufacturing, 38 percent of the footprint. I was personally surprised to see that transportation was only 5 percent of Apple’s total, given how many online sales it has for hardware and the fact that all of its product are manufactured in Asia. I imagine this figure would be significantly higher if Apple hadn’t so dramatically reduced the size of its packaging (and products) over the last several years.

All in all, I love this move. It’s about time Apple threw down the gauntlet and tried to lead its industry to places its competitors are uncomfortable going.

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Via BusinessWeek

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