Apple Environmental Report: Carbon Footprint Down 3%, 145 U.S. Stores Now Using 100% Renewable Energy

[peterdevries]

The raping and polluting of China's natural resources is happening at a breakneck pace for Apple's profits.

If you feel this passionate about that than maybe you shouldn't be powering up your computer and chain yourself to a fence somewhere to protest. You probably have a house full of items made by polluting companies: clothing, furniture, food, consumer electronics. So, in stead of seeming all conscious about what is going on here you are just another one of us enabling this to continue.

Make sure you don't hurt yourself climbing off of that high horse..

 

[aloshka]

Alright, all I was saying is that even a little, even if it's for marketing purposes can have a good effect. If people respond with "oh yeah, that's important", then other companies will follow suite as everyone wants to have a "good" image.

If everyone reacts like they do on this forum (i.e. who cares, or they are hypocrites, or America sucks), then nothing will change. Little goes a long way, hopefully Apple is paving just a little. And if it helps their sales, even 0.5%, it's enough to be noticed even if it's for the wrong reasons.

 

[PocketSand11]

Before all the self high fiving and fist pumps by those who are feeling all warm and fuzzy about being Apple customers, Apple is spending a few hundred million out of their $100B+ wad to sound green.

The greenest thing they could ever do? Sell and promote an iPhone you only upgrade every 5-7 years. That includes new iOS support. They'll never do this. Why? The thing they worship more than lower (or zero) carbon footprinting, is the bottom line.

The raping and polluting of China's natural resources is happening at a breakneck pace for Apple's profits.

Also the rate at which software developers everywhere leave behind old hardware is astonishing. As hardware gets better, programmers (especially web) get lazier to compensate. If only we could go back in time to 1980 to see the look on a programmer's face when he sees Excel using 1GB of RAM.

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If you feel this passionate about that than maybe you shouldn't be powering up your computer and chain yourself to a fence somewhere to protest. You probably have a house full of items made by polluting companies: clothing, furniture, food, consumer electronics. So, in stead of seeming all conscious about what is going on here you are just another one of us enabling this to continue.

Make sure you don't hurt yourself climbing off of that high horse..

Maybe he's like me, and he just doesn't upgrade his Mac

 

[peterdevries]

Alright, all I was saying is that even a little, even if it's for marketing purposes can have a good effect. If people respond with "oh yeah, that's important", then other companies will follow suite as everyone wants to have a "good" image.

If everyone reacts like they do on this forum (i.e. who cares, or they are hypocrites, or America sucks), then nothing will change. Little goes a long way, hopefully Apple is paving just a little. And if it helps their sales, even 0.5%, it's enough to be noticed even if it's for the wrong reasons.

I agree. We can't expect a 180 degree turnaround from all companies at once. This is a good step and it will be followed by more. Those that are so passionate here to say that "it isn't enough" should have a long hard look at themselves and wonder whether they really need all that hardware in their signature and whether they recycle everything they own.

 

[Tech198]

What about further up the chain ? Foxconn for instance,

Even though there are people out there that will recycle responsibly etc...... personally i don't care....

You think I would really wanna prefer buying a computer knowing it can recycled better than another ?

As long as i can use it, who gives a hoot..... One company does all this to try and make it "better on their terms, but unless all companies work the same, your only helping, not preventing anything.. Ya, it won't happen overnight, but we've had a few years.

End result, you may as well not do it. A change on a larger scale is a lot better off than just one company doing it. Although good.

Again, Apple only talks about U.S... that makes the others not do anything .... Hardly worth the effort.

 

[aloshka]

Also the rate at which software developers everywhere leave behind old hardware is astonishing. As hardware gets better, programmers (especially web) get lazier to compensate. If only we could go back in time to 1980 to see the look on a programmer's face when he sees Excel or Safari using 1GB of RAM.

That's because in 1980 it was all text-based. If you are willing to stay with simple text-based stuff, then by all means. I'm a developer and all I can say, is that we aren't getting lazier. Things are becoming more complicated. People want higher res graphics (retina), animations everywhere, insane amount of data transfers/storage (movies, etc). All this adds complexity that requires A LOT of hardware power. With every iteration of a phone, people want faster, more storage. All that requires hardware changes. Don't even get me started on the complexity of games. People's demands is what drives hardware at such ridiculous speeds. Not developers. People are not wanting to buy the iPhone 5S right now, because they want faster, bigger screen, etc. Not Apple's fault, they are giving you what you want; and what you want is not to be stuck with a text-only phone.

I think developers that worked through the 80's and 90's MISS those days. Any good developer I've talked to agree with the notion that things were so much easier back then. You didn't have to think of the paradox of parallel processing, race conditions, insane amount of graphics, animating everything, 7-8 different languages to know/use, not to mention the insane amount of libraries that are required.

If you were being sarcastic about the developer laziness thing, ignore this whole post then.

 

[MattInOz]

Expect Apple's carbon footprint to rise if they start using graphene.

Or will it drop because they are sequestering carbon inside computers?

 

[PocketSand11]

If you were being sarcastic about the developer laziness thing, ignore this whole post then.

Well, no, but I was referring to the lower-level programmers who set all the platforms and such, and a few devs who for some reason make high-level applications really heavy. I'm a developer-in-training myself who is subject to whatever tools Apple, Google, etc provide me, especially when I'm on the iOS side, so most of what runs in my program isn't written by me.

If you look at things like Flash, Excel, and web standards, you see a trend of things requiring much more power to do very little extra. My comment about 1980 wasn't fully serious. Just from Excel 2004 to 2013, there's way more RAM usage to do the same old spreadsheet without charts. The same Flash game or video is suddenly slower with the newer versions of Flash (I have tested directly). YouTube won't work anymore on old computers even though it used to always work back when those computers were new. Google Images is slow, but if I set the user agent to IE5 to force the old version, it suddenly is very fast, and the only difference is minor visual effects. Mavericks is slow on computers that are supposed to support it, even though it has hardly any new features visible to the user. Photoshop is the worst if you look at its CPU and VRAM usage across multiple versions to do very similar tasks.

I can definitely understand games requiring more and more resources. Well, except for Minecraft. I can't stand how inefficient Java and so many programs written in it are. I remember writing Pong in Java in school using all the right programming techniques and marveling at the constant 20% CPU usage on a Core Duo to display a bouncing ball.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

They say that the new campus is supposed to use 100% renewable energy, so does this mean that they've changed the plans for it. Because I rememeber environmental organizations kicking up a fuss about how it'd have it's own natural gas powerstation.

In case you didn't know, natural gas is far from a renewable energy source, it's something they pump out of the ground like oil. That flame you see on top of old oil rigs is natural gas flowing out of the well being burned off (these days they collect the stuff and sell it as "natural gas").

 

[bushman4]

Good to see that Applw is using their money for the good of mankind. We see many other companies making billions and not spending a penny on improving the environment

 

[peterdevries]

They say that the new campus is supposed to use 100% renewable energy, so does this mean that they've changed the plans for it. Because I rememeber environmental organizations kicking up a fuss about how it'd have it's own natural gas powerstation.

In case you didn't know, natural gas is far from a renewable energy source, it's something they pump out of the ground like oil. That flame you see on top of old oil rigs is natural gas flowing out of the well being burned off (these days they collect the stuff and sell it as "natural gas").

It's easy to fool consumers. Many people think electric cars draw their energy from a magic source that produces electricity withou any impact on society. In reality much of the energy is produced through good old coal power stations. Precious little thought is also placed into how much resources and waste is generated by putting rechargers everywhere.

 

[iBug2]

It's easy to fool consumers. Many people think electric cars draw their energy from a magic source that produces electricity withou any impact on society. In reality much of the energy is produced through good old coal power stations. Precious little thought is also placed into how much resources and waste is generated by putting rechargers everywhere.

Yeah except there are other methods to produce electricity, such as wind and solar power, which don't produce much carbon footprint, where as to make gasoline you HAVE TO produce carbon footprint, a lot, not even counting the footprint of burning gasoline itself.

 

[PocketSand11]

It's easy to fool consumers. Many people think electric cars draw their energy from a magic source that produces electricity withou any impact on society. In reality much of the energy is produced through good old coal power stations. Precious little thought is also placed into how much resources and waste is generated by putting rechargers everywhere.

A big advantage of electric cars is that they use less energy. That is, if you just took gasoline, burned it to generate electricity, and used it to power an electric car instead, it would be better than using a gasoline car.

 

[numlock]

If you feel this passionate about that than maybe you shouldn't be powering up your computer and chain yourself to a fence somewhere to protest. You probably have a house full of items made by polluting companies: clothing, furniture, food, consumer electronics. So, in stead of seeming all conscious about what is going on here you are just another one of us enabling this to continue.

Make sure you don't hurt yourself climbing off of that high horse..

there is nothing "high horsy" about the post. greenwashing is real and the majority of your post does nothing but highlight the difficult position customers are put in

 

[PocketSand11]

there is nothing "high horsy" about the post. greenwashing is real and the majority of your post does nothing but highlight the difficult position customers are put in

Exactly. I've seen ads for "green" DVDs. It all happened in 2008. Americans think they're "being green" now, but then if you go to Europe, you see how it's really done, and they don't even make any fuss or advertise about it. They consume in moderation, reuse bags, drive small and efficient cars (stick shift too), etc.

 

[SarcasticJoe]

Yeah except there are other methods to produce electricity, such as wind and solar power, which don't produce much carbon footprint, where as to make gasoline you HAVE TO produce carbon footprint, a lot, not even counting the footprint of burning gasoline itself.

Wind and solar power are actually far from carbon footprint free the same way nuclear power is. Nether produces that much in form of carbon emissions when running (which is what ecomentalists like to go on about), but building, maintaining and eventually decomissioning does produce quite a lot of it (which is something ecomentalists like to ignore or purposefully hide). Remember reading about how wind mill comsumes about as much energy to build, maintain and decomission as it produces in it's entire lifespan, which really makes wind power a 100% feel good kind of thing as all it does is increase carbon emissions as the power used to build, maintain and decomission it is from fossile fuels. Nuclear power on the other hand makes up for the energy put into building the plants and with interest.

The main reason why we're in such a solar and wind craze is because of government subsidies for the damn things. If they didn't give huge tax breaks to power companies, they wouldn't be building the damn things and if they gave the same kind of deal to nuclear power, we'd be in a massive nuclear power buildup. The environmental movement pretty much put a stop to nuclear power buildup in the 70's even thou it's way actually "greener" than Wind or solar power.

If they really gave nuclear power the same kind of deal we'd finally be seeing commercial breeder reactors become a reality. Breeder reactors recycle their fuel and thus produce much less waste, which is radioactive for a few 100 years, not over 100.000 years.

 

[iBug2]

Wind and solar power are actually far from carbon footprint free the same way nuclear power is. Nether produces that much in form of carbon emissions when running (which is what ecomentalists like to go on about), but building, maintaining and eventually decomissioning does produce quite a lot of it (which is something ecomentalists like to ignore or purposefully hide). Remember reading about how wind mill comsumes about as much energy to build, maintain and decomission as it produces in it's entire lifespan, which really makes wind power a 100% feel good kind of thing as all it does is increase carbon emissions as the power used to build, maintain and decomission it is from fossile fuels. Nuclear power on the other hand makes up for the energy put into building the plants and with interest.

Obviously building solar panels or wind turbines leaves a big carbon footprint, not to mention building wind turbines uses a precious rare metal neodymium which the earth does not have a lot of. Nobody is denying that. But so does building an oil refinery. Nuclear is a whole different story. It doesn't just build tons of carbon footprint, it produces nuclear waste for which we need to build rockets to throw them into space, which leaves even more carbon footprint.

I'm not even going into the fact that wind and solar power are practically endless where gasoline is. So if we are to continue powering our life in the near future, we need to spend our R&D resources into wind and solar more than oil. Learn how to make and maintain them for cheap and with using less energy.

All in all, wind and solar is much better than oil. Not saying that they are "the ultimate" solution, nothing is. The only solution is to stop producing and spending this much.

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The main reason why we're in such a solar and wind craze is because of government subsidies for the damn things. If they didn't give huge tax breaks to power companies, they wouldn't be building the damn things and if they gave the same kind of deal to nuclear power, we'd be in a massive nuclear power buildup. The environmental movement pretty much put a stop to nuclear power buildup in the 70's even thou it's way actually "greener" than Wind or solar power.

If they really gave nuclear power the same kind of deal we'd finally be seeing commercial breeder reactors become a reality. Breeder reactors recycle their fuel and thus produce much less waste, which is radioactive for a few 100 years, not over 100.000 years.

Is that the reason Germany is decommissioning all nuclear power plants?

 

[henzpwnapple]

Hilarious.

Samsung's been green and environmentally conscious many years before Apple even thought of going green.

Any prove? I am not challenging your statement, but I would love to know more good things about Samsung.

 

[LittleChief]

I don't get the crazies!! Being green and sustainable isn't entirely about the concept or reality of global warming! It's about being efficient, much like Apple's products. Why be wasteful? Why pollute our only home? It's 'exactly' like crapping in your own front room!

Samsung are the guys who throw more power at something as a solution. Apple are the guys who use lower clocked components with efficient software to complete the tasks quicker with less energy draw. One of them is smarter.

Green energy is also becoming 'greener' all the time with more research, funding & investment. These are first steps on a long road but when we nail it in the next 20 years, it will revolutionise the world. Our increasing energy demands will be sustainable, self powered as the natural world does the heavy lifting. Power will be a decentralised grid & you'll be living in equilibrium with the planet... your only home!!! (currently)

 

[phoenixsan]

I praise.....

Apple for seeking a "greener" way to do things. They had put some serious effort and money to be better in that issues. And yet, the cynical part of me asks about some tax relief based on the greener approach.....

 

[s2mikey]

It gives me a lot of hope that a major corporation can renounce maximum possible profits in favor of values that help us all. Maybe we aren't doomed.

You mean like creating jobs here and paying people good wages and benefits? Oh wait, Nevermind, it's more important to cater to junk science and carbon footprint BS. Face it, this is just a PR move. There is ZERO chance that this will have any impact on anything other than to appease the limp dick hippies.

Whatever.

 

[thekeyring]

More proof than ever that it's possible to live a modern lifestyle and not destroy the planet.

I hope to one day be able to afford to make my home as energy independent as possible (generate it all on-site with solar panels, etc)

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Apple for seeking a "greener" way to do things. They had put some serious effort and money to be better in that issues. And yet, the cynical part of me asks about some tax relief based on the greener approach.....

Maybe they're just getting ready for when we get so close to running out of oil the price of energy goes through the roof.

Though as that won't be for another 100 years maybe not.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

From the report:
"Our study revealed that emissions associated with manufacturing our aluminum housings were nearly four times higher than we believed, so we’ve updated our 2013 life cycle analysis data to be more accurate. As a result, the carbon emissions we reported for 2013 are 9 percent higher than the carbon emissions we reported for 2012. However, this increase is due to previously underestimating our emissions, not because our emissions increased. In fact, when we recalculated the 2012 data using the new methodology, our carbon emissions actually dropped by 3 percent year over year.

In other words, carbon emissions from aluminum is more than they thought. But even when they apply this fairly to both 2012 and 2013, total emissions had decreased by 3%. 1) That's only fair, as a stricter interpretation should not be applied merely to the latest year 2) "Oops actually when I look again, we did better" is hardly a brilliant way to deceive people 3) They are applying stricter standards of measurement, producing more goods, and still resulting in a small net decrease.

I'm not saying that they didn't have a decrease between 2012 and 2013. I'm saying it's not a fair statement to say this is their first decrease ever. They're using an entirely new method now, which means there's no way to compare the pre-2012 data to the data from 2012 and 2013. Which means they only have a single y/y to look at - it could have been their first increase ever or their first decrease ever. There's no trends to look at because either way its the first y/y they've ever had with the new method.

 

[sk1wbw]

The “carbon footprint” can’t be going down. Apple keeps hiring people and people contain carbon.

 

[swy05]

Thanks for the clarification. Just answered based on memory, but you are right.

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A brand value site? You realize it's the internet, and anyone can post anything they want w/o having to explain themselves. Or am I the only one that understands a "branding" site probably does not have good information. All these companies are their clients and I'm assuming these guys get paid by their clients. Or was that the point you were making?

Come on now buddy. Surely you're not serious.

No one is talking about brand value.

Did you even bother to click on the company and see the information that's detailed? It explains in detail how exactly these companies are environmentally conscious.

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Any prove? I am not challenging your statement, but I would love to know more good things about Samsung.

You mean proof?

I already replied on page 2. Hope you didn't miss it.