William Gallagher
Apple's Lisa Jackson says that buyers do not pay an Apple tax in order to fund the company's work fighting climate change and making its products greener.
While some reports say Apple's environmental efforts far exceed those of its rivals, others accuse the firm of "greenwashing" its figures to look better. Apple itself is calling on its suppliers to decarbonize by 2030, and now it is saying that this work does not make its iPhone more expensive.
"We don't factor in a premium to take care of the work that we're doing," Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, told Reuters.
"I want to do it in a way that other businesses can say this isn't because they're Apple," she said. "It's because they understand how to make clean energy and (recyclable) materials work in the manufacturing chains and drive emissions down."
Jackson says that this is a direct instruction from Apple CEO Tim Cook. Cook has been repeatedly stressing that its Apple Watch is the firm's first carbon-neutral product.
But Jackson, while praising the 78% reduction in its carbon footprint for the Apple Watch, notes that beyond buying carbon offsets, the firm still can't reduce what Reuters calls almost 8 kilograms of emissions from each device including transportation and logistical considerations.
"We just right now don't have the ability to take care" of that, says Jackson. But she does see Apple making an increasing impact. "That's somewhere Apple can invest and then help to scale and bring (other) businesses along."
Speaking at the Reuters Next Conference in New York, Jackson also talked about the practical difficulties of moving to carbon-neutral devices.
"Even making the windmills to generate renewable energy has a carbon footprint," she said, "and so you have to account for that."
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24 Comments
This woman's mere existence on the payroll proves that Apple is wasting money on these efforts which are nothing more than virtue signaling. "Carbon emissions" go hand-in-hand with a productive, developed economy; those who obsess over carbon emissions would have us living in the stone age. No thanks.
I guess the money spent comes from the magic fairy pile of funds.
In economic terms, pollution generated during production of a thing is an externalized cost. That is, it’s a cost of production that is shifted to everyone else, and away from the manufacturer. That savings can either be used to reduce the price tag for consumers and/or simply added to the company’s profit line.
First you have to assume CO2 is a pollutant. In which case you should stop breathing because you’re externalizing the costs of your existence upon me. There is still much debate over the impact of CO2 on climate change. I know the plant world is very happy to see more CO2 in the atmosphere.