Apple and Foxconn are teaming up to build solar power plants that will ensure its iPhone-manufacturing factories in China run on 100 percent clean energy.
Foxconn has committed to constructing more than 400 megawatts of solar power plants, beginning in China’s Henan Province, by 2018. Apple will also build an addition 200 megawatts of solar projects throughout China, helping offset the carbon produced by the rest of its supply chain.
A patent published today shows that Apple is investigating new halogen free, flame-retardant materials for use in its devices.
According to Apple, only about 12% of plastics currently contain flame retardants. An increased use of such materials would improve the safety of electrical wiring and electronic devices, and help reduce the number of fires caused by electronic devices as a result.
Halogenated flame retardants have been found to be effective in many plastics, but these are increasingly regulated as a result of environmental concerns. Since sustainability is a big topic for Apple, the company therefore wanted to discover a material that would possess similar fire-retardant qualities, while also not being damaging to the environment.
Tuesday’s patent describes a material with these qualities, that also produces only negligible amounts of toxic substances while burning. As per Apple, the material could be used in devices including the iMac, MacBook Pro, iPhone, and iPad.
Tim Cook is set to take to the stage today as part of the opening ceremony of environmental event, Climate Week NYC, in New York.
The event is focused on driving change in business practices relating to the environment — particularly in terms of lowering carbon emissions.
Cook is one of several speakers who will appear at the event, alongside the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the President of World Bank, and executives from IKEA and Bloomberg.
Less than a decade ago, Apple was singled out by Greenpeace as one of the least environmentally-friendly tech companies on the planet.
Apple has since turned over a new leaf, embracing environmentalism as something every bit as central to the company as the latest iPhone.
Just how important became evident a few months ago, when, during a routine earnings call, Cook spoke of his dream for Apple as a “force for good in the world beyond our products.” The recent global celebrations for Earth Day for the first time in nearly a decade mean that his dream is closer to becoming a reality.
So what changed exactly?
“When I was at Apple from 1999 to 2005, sustainability was pretty much an afterthought,” says Abraham Farag, a former senior mechanical engineer of product design at Apple. Farag describes Apple’s approach to being green at the time as “lip service.”
Under Steve Jobs, Apple’s refusal to embrace sustainability came down to two principle factors: cost and design. For example, recycling plants wanted components which weighed over 25 grams to be marked with a special code so that they could be properly recycled. “But the marks were not pretty so Apple wouldn’t put them on,” Farag says. “Sustainability [organizations] want different materials to be attached in a method that was able to be separated later for recycling. No way we could alter the design for that consideration. Pure looks trumped any possible consideration for sustainability.”
Of the 16 mentions of the word “environment” that appear in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, all except one have to do with the environment (read: the mood and corporate ethos) inside technology companies. Jobs was a man who wanted to shape environments, not be shaped by the environment.
The same is true for the appearance of other words like “sustainability,” “green,” and other buzzwords that will likely appear time and again in the Tim Cook biography, when it is written. The only mention of the word “recycling” is in the context of an annoyance: a plane which flew overhead during Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement address, waving a banner which read “Recycle all e-waste” and threatening to distract listeners.
Apple’s environmental tussles reached their nadir in 2005, when the company got into a spat with Greenpeace International. Greenpeace slammed Apple for its use of toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process, and also for its lack of a recycling program. Jobs stood up for Apple’s environmental efforts at first — particularly when compared to competitors — but soon agreed that changes needed to be made. From mid-2006, Apple began phasing out CRTs and replacing them with LCD monitors, which met the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances in electronics, years before the EU deadline for compliance.
Apple additionally focused on lowering the power requirements of many of its products in general, which scored high Energy Star ratings, as well as gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which attempts to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifespans — taking into account energy use, recyclability, and the manufacturing process. Products were also redesigned with recycling in mind — seen by choices like the decision to switch from plastic to aluminum for Macs.
While Jobs got the lion’s share of the credit, behind the scenes two of the driving forces behind the “greening” of Apple were reportedly Tim Cook and Jony Ive. As both began to get more power within the company, Apple’s focus on sustainability grew.
What was key about Cook and Ive being sustainability advocates was their placement within Apple. Since both had considerable operating autonomy, they were able to get things done that predecessors with similar ideas had never been able to. For instance, while Abraham Farag was employed at Apple he recalls the company hiring a former colleague he had worked with at IDEO. She was brought on with the job title of program manager for Environmental Technologies and Strategies Group within R&D; charged with tracking environmental attributes for all new hardware projects.
There was just one problem, however: she was the only one doing this at the time.
“Imagine with everything Apple was doing they [only] had one person looking at the environmental impacts,” Farag says. “[There’s simply] no way one person could have much impact without very strong top-down support, which she didn’t get. She certainly tried, but it was an impossible task.”
Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers.
With Cook and Ive now the two most powerful people at Apple, the focus on environmental factors has gained steam. In May 2013, Cook announced that Apple had hired the former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to serve as its top environmental adviser.
“Apple has shown how innovation can drive real progress by removing toxics from its products, incorporating renewable energy in its data center plans, and continually raising the bar for energy efficiency in the electronics industry,” Jackson said around the time she joined. “I look forward to helping support and promote these efforts, as well as leading new ones in the future aimed at protecting the environment.”
New reports coming out of Apple have continued the stress the company’s breakthrough green products — from a Mac Pro which uses less than half the allowable energy limit, to a focus on the environment in Apple’s latest Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.
Cook has also sorted out the last of the major sticking points for Apple’s green credentials: its data centers, which saw Apple ranked dead last out of various tech companies in a 2011 Greenpeace report. Jump forward just a few years, and Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers, as part of its pledge to use 100% renewable energy to power all of its facilities.
Similar sentiments are behind the decision for Apple’s $5.5 billion Cupertino “spaceship” headquarters to have 70% of its power provided on-site by photovoltaics and fuel cells, with the remaining power covered by sustainable “green sources” in California.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley, speaking with Cult of Mac about Apple’s drive toward promoting sustainability as one of its primary goals. While Sculley notes that Jobs was responsible for a great many groundbreaking innovations, he has it on good authority that Cook is the one who has driven Apple’s embrace of sustainability.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley.
The company’s green direction may look like a marketing stunt. After all, this is hardly an area that Apple is coming to early.
But it is something that Tim Cook feels strongly about. A cool and collected CEO with none of Jobs’ reputation for tantrums, Cook has lost his temper very few times publically while at the helm of Apple. One of those occasions came in March this year, however, when he was pushed by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research to disclose the cost of Apple’s sustainability programs.
Claiming that ethical decisions sometimes trump financial ones, Cook snapped that he didn’t “consider the bloody ROI” (return-on-investment) when it came to promoting sustainability. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock,” he said.
Cook has often sounded too much like a person impersonating Steve Jobs during his stint as CEO: saying the kinds of things Steve might say, but without Jobs’ charisma and ability to distort reality with his “gee whiz” boy inventor proclamations.
When Cook narrated Apple’s recent Earth Day commercial, though, it came across as Cook speaking about a subject he felt passionate about, that you couldn’t imagine coming out of Jobs’ mouth.
At the same time, the ad — and the overall vision for Apple — works because it makes total sense given the company’s ethos. Apple might only have embraced environmentalism lately, but its identity owes a great deal to organizations like the Whole Earth Catalog — the hippie-tech magazine Jobs mentioned during his Stanford commencement address. The phrase “Stay hungry, stay foolish” came from that magazine’s founder, Stewart Brand, who stayed in touch with Jobs his entire life.
Brand’s 1960s vision was for a combining of personal technology with the kind of back-to-nature thinking prevalent in counterculture circles. Jobs took many of the Whole Earth Catalog’s ideas, but instead of using them to refer to the literal ecosystem, he used them as metaphors for the kind of tech ecosystem Apple runs on today — where sales in the App Store, drive iPhone sales, which drive iPad sales, and so on.
Tim Cook’s vision for Apple as a green company brings Apple back in line with that ideology — minus the metaphor.
At a time when new earning reports coming out of Apple are spun as negatives once again by certain analysts (despite another record quarter), and the world is still awaiting the next breakthrough Apple innovation, Cook may have given it to us with Apple’s rethought approach to sustainability.
His belief in Apple as an environmental “force for good” speaks more of a man evolving what Apple stands for as a company — rather than continuing to rule over the kind of “haunted empire” Yukari Iwatani Kane described Apple as in her recent book.
It might not be an iWatch, but perhaps this will ultimately prove to be Tim Cook’s lasting legacy at Apple.
And, hey, it’s never bad when Apple gets to point out how it genuinely “thinks different” to competitors like Samsung.
Apple needs a lot of tin to make its assortment of gadgets, but tin can be a very environmentally unfriendly business. It can destroy tropical forests and coral reefs, and it can bankrupt the people who depend on tropical forests and coral reefs for their livelihood. No tropical forests? No trees. No coral reefs? No fish.
Much of the tin-mining in the world is done on Bangka Island in Indonesia. Unfortunately, only some of the tin mining done there is regulated, meaning they watch out for the environmental impact. Recently, there’s been a lot of concern that Apple might actually be buying up tin from unregulated mines, taking part in the environmental destruction of the locale. That’s why Apple’s launching an investigation on the matter.
Apple has been praised by Chinese environmental activist Ma Jun for its “aggressive” adoption of progressive environmental policies in China. The Cupertino company, which initially refused to cooperate with the Beijing-based Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs (IPE), has gone further than any of its peers in the technology industry, Ma said.
There are seventeen rare earth elements in the periodic table: fifteen lanthanides, plus scandium and yttrium. About nine of those elements go into every iPhone sold… and if China were suddenly to disappear from a map tomorrow, Apple would lose about 90% of those elements.
Those nine rare-earth elements are used in all sorts of things to make your iPhone, including providing the LCD display, help polish the glass, build the speakers, make the phone circuitry and even allow your iPhone to vibrate on silent mode. But they are also an environmental nightmare to actually claw out of the earth, which is why China — which doesn’t care much about such issues — has a stranglehold on them.
The new Lightning-to-30-pin adapter is a tiny thing, just a little dongle that routes signals from your old iPhone dock or connector to the appropriate pins in the new Lightning adapter. It’s smaller than the size of a matchbook.
Despite this, however, reader Doug P. emailed us with an image of how much packaging the adapter comes in: not only is Apple’s retail packaging for the adapter six times bigger than the adapter itself, but the shipping box it comes in looks like could easily hold up to thirty adapters without their packaging.
Apple’s efforts to be greener mean it boasts some of the most environmentally friendly gadgets on the planet. The new iPhone 5, for example, is one of the greenest smartphones money can buy. Apple also tries to make its packaging green. In fact, the packing for its new EarPods is so environmentally friendly that it turns to mush when you submerge it in water.
It’s August, which means two things. One, there’s no news to report on, which means that most of a gadget blogger’s workday is taken up with siestas and refreshing beverages. And two, it’s vacation time! That’s right: The whole northern hemisphere likes to take a break at exactly the same time, all the better to enjoy congested roads, overpriced plane tickets and overcrowded hotels.
To ease your pain, we’ve put together a list of the best travel gadgets. You may not enjoy spending a hot and stuffy month with your in-laws, but at least your tech won’t let you down.
There are a few ways to keep your phone juiced as you ride. Those with foresight will have specced a wheel with a dynamo hub and USB adapter. Those who live in sunnier climes might opt for a solar panel. ANd those who lack both good weather and good planning skills can grab the Tigra BikeCharge, an iPhone charger that will fit any bike.
Noteshelf? Evernote? Wacom’s amazing Inkling? Pah! These are all electronic pretenders to the crown of the real portable note-taking king: paper. And with the Binder Clip Case, you can add this noble, non-shareable, non-searchable technology to your iPhone 4/S.
I spent most of last week riding my loaded-up bike through the north of Spain, and as any self-respecting geek would do, I was carrying gadgets, including a power-hungry iPad 3, and a Changers solar-powered charger. I’m planning a longer post on how this worked out, but right now I’m going to tell you about a new accessory for the Changers charger which should make it even more effective on road trips.
Just days after word broke that Apple had decided to withdraw its products from the EPEAT registry, San Francisco announced that the city would will stop procurement of Apple’s Mac desktops and notebooks. The move may be the first of many such announcements as many local, state, and federal agencies mandate purchases of only computers that meet the EPEAT criteria.
Apple’s decision to remove 39 of its products from the registry is puzzling to many considering that Apple is very vocal and transparent about the environmental friendliness of its products and processes. Apple was also one of the companies that helped create the EPEAT standards in 2006.
According to the San Jose Mercury News, Apple’s new “spaceship” campus is one step closer to becoming a reality, thanks to a measure taken by California’s Governor Jerry Brown, which will allow the new planned campus to qualify for an expedited environmental review.
If you live in a place that needs air-con, then you probably already have it. You can move along now. But if you are shopping for a new AC unit, or you happened to buy one made by Kühl, then why not consider this new dongle that will let you control the unit from the cool comfort of your own iPhone?
Going camping this spring? And by “camping” I mean hiking or biking with your home on your back, and heading out into the wilderness. I don’t mean loading up your SUV and dragging a grill, a tent the size of a European house and enough ball games to keep an entire schools-worth of kids occupied for a month.
So, if you’re heading out under your own power, how about taking a stove that a) requires no liquid fuel, b) burns fast and hot and c) charges your iPhone? What’s not to like?
Some combinations are so obviously good when you see/hear/taste them that you wonder why they haven’t existed forever. Of course, some *have* been around for that long.
Just 6,000 years ago, when the universe winked into existence, the Lord blessed us with such holy wonders as apple pie (or apple crumble in the King James bible) and vanilla ice-cream; Dungeons *and* dragons; and of course hurtling, death-dealing two-ton automobiles and chronically distracted drivers.
Now we can add another devine device to that list: the solar-powered hands-free speakerphone.
This is Fragile Earth, an interactive photo gallery designed to teach you a little about ecology, conservation and the natural environment.
Since I got the Changers solar charger to test, I haven’t plugged a USB-chargeable device into anything else (with the exception of my iPad). Changers comes as a kit containing a solar panel and a battery pack, along with a a bag of tips that fit most cellphones and gadgets. But this description doesn’t do justice to what is a rather excellent and useful device.
As Tim Cook put it at this morning’s event, Apple’s iCloud “just works” and 100 million customers love the lofty storage service.
Greenpeace, however, says Apple’s iCloud is an unsustainable coal-fueled mess and that the just-announced movie service will only make it worse.
“Apple is about innovation, but buying coal at really cheap source is not innovative,” Greenpeace senior policy analyst Gary Cook told Cult of Mac. “Those data centers [supporting iCloud] are fueled by about 60 percent coal.”
It’s light, it’s tough and it’s beautiful to both look at and touch. Is there anything better than bamboo for making an iPad case? Maybe not. And Silva’s bamboo case for the iPad 2 is finally, finally available to buy.
Your iPhone and iPad are great paper replacements, but they couldn’t actively stop it. Until now: PaperKarma is an iPhone app which lets you stop paper junk mail, just by snapping a photo of it.
Apple takes pride in making its products environmentally friendly. It has worked to reduce its carbon footprint by keeping its product packaging to a minimum, removing toxic materials from its entire product line, making its devices more energy efficient and lots more.
However, the company isn’t the greenest of tech companies. It ranks fourth in Greenpeace’s “Guide to Greener Electronics,” with HP, Dell, and Nokia leading the way.
