Originally posted by MacRumorSkeptic
Who cares?! The world summit is full of nothing but a bunch of anti-capitalism socialists who would love to see the U.S. and its companies in financial ruin. Compare our air/water quality to any other industrialized nation on the earth and you'll find that its of the highest standard.
AND! Don't get me started on how it would hurt the consumer as these big companies would simply make-up for the expense of abiding to these enviro-standards by passing it off onto us.
I'll deal with both sections of that and hopefully shed some light on the actual topic of this thread.
Firstly the people attending the World Summit in Johannesburg arent anti-capitalism socialists. They come from a very wide variety of areas and more than a few of them work for large corporates. They arent seeking to put their employers out of business.
Secondly air and water quality in the US is terrible. I really hate to break that fact to you but it is fairly universally known by the environmental engineers in the US. Australias water quality is lousy too but it isnt from coal its from a variety of more serious areas, many of which the US also faces.
Next on to the expense of environmental standards and dealing with environmental wastes (hit page down a few times if you dont want to read this
). I wont go into that much detail because in all honesty this topic area is massive and if I get started I wont stop. I could easily write a book on this topic.
To abbreviate it into a few words the basis of these environmental standards is largely from the fact that previously it has been the custom of companies to ignore the environmental aspects of their operations especially when it is cheaper to do so. That simply is
not a viable mode of operations. These standards arent cooky things people at Greenpeace have thought up. Professionals, following very detailed reports into the areas, develop them. They are an effort to apply value to the environment and create level playing fields (Ill explain that later).
There is a major issue when it comes to being environmentally friendly (depending on the industry and environmental concern this can in fact be not the case. Often by being environmentally friendly you improve efficiencies and thereby economic performance as well. It's quite complex) and that is the fact that often it is cheaper to not be. So unless you are being forced there is little incentive to be environmentally friendly (also not entirely true but to be perfectly honest Im not going overboard with detail because I doubt people will read most of it. If you really want it though it isnt hard considering this is one of the areas I work in). Let me give you an example.
When you manufacture paint you produce roughly 8 litres of wastewater per 1 litre of paint (the US alone produces roughly 5 million litres of paint each year). I was having a discussion with someone not long ago and basically they said why don't you hand off those 8 litres to the people buying the paint and have them deal with it or include it in your price. The reply to giving it to the consumer to deal with is rather sobering.
If you give it to the consumer to deal with most likely it will just go down the sink. Consumers really aren't willing to pay to deal with these issues because to be frank most people are too ill educated to understand them. Around 90% of consumers fit into a broad group that basically says, If I cant see it, it mustnt be affecting me. Most people dont quite understand the wastes that a single plant can produce let alone a city or country full and honestly most dont care.
To be perfectly blunt in an ideal world if a consumer is going to use a good or service they should have to deal with the cost of dealing with the waste. People are just too used to the past where the environment wasnt a factor at all and therefore didnt contribute to price at all. To some extent they do have to pay these costs now but by and large consumers get off cheap.
As to passing the price on to the consumer this is a little more complicated. To generalise and simplify it a great deal though it is difficult to be environmentally friendly and remain economically competitive with your competitors, who arent incurring the additional costs you are. That simplifies it somewhat though. For instance a certain Aluminium smelting company used to produce left over waste metal, which was causing some environmental issues, just by recycling that metal they managed to save themselves around $2 million a year. Not a lot but that is a very minor case.
That said when you bring minimum legislated levels into practice that ultimately tighten over time the climate changes somewhat. For instance in plant design now quite often people will look ahead in development and try to design clean so to speak. By being ahead of the curve from the start you will have a longer grace period before you have to start addressing environmental issues.
The benefit of legislating though is a) you get everybody to a critical point and b) nobody has an economic excuse compared to competitors (not quite true again but I have a character limit
) for not implementing improvements and in fact you have economic reasons to implement change.
Onto Apple and the computer industry as a whole. This is a little complicated (it always is) and there will always be people that debate whether this is Apples concern or someone elses.
Firstly LCDs and power. From a simple power point of view LCDs are better than CRTs were. Modern computers are also not that huge a drain (around 10 lights) on the power supply and Macs tend to require less power than most. From a power point of view they arent a huge problem however they should always be looking to improve energy efficiency.
From a recycling point of view it is possible. It would be similar to recycling mobile phones, which is done in Europe. There is certainly some argument that computer manufacturers should have to deal with the computer once it becomes waste. The real problem is that you really dont get much back from recycling a computer and it is a rather costly procedure.
From a lifecycle point of view the industry isnt wonderful, although it probably isnt the worst. Most of the environmental concerns come from the manufacturing stages upstream of Apple. There is a significant amount of waste with computers and ultimately you can attribute that to the manufacturer. They can certainly do a lot to cut down on material usage and encourage upstream users to be friendlier to the environment (processor manufacturing, plastics and metals. It isnt nice wonderful upstream).
The problem faced by the computer industry is similar to the car industry. They cant really do much with the car once it is dead and there are a lot of wasted materials in it so they really need to increase its useful life expectancy (cars currently average 7 year lives and need to reach around 20 25), improve efficiencies and decrease material usages.
