Today Apple released a series of videos on their environmental efforts that are pretty fun and informative. Moreover, Lisa Jackson, the former head of the EPA and Apple’s current VP of all things Environmental did an interview on the The Talk Show. I think John did a great job on this interview and I learned a lot about exactly how invested Apple is in this issue. A great listen on Earth Day.
Yesterday Apple released it’s 2017 Environmental Progress Report. The company has come a long way on this front in the last few years. They’ve got most of their operations working off renewable energy. They’ve also developed a robot that takes iPhones apart so they can better recycle. The big announcement with this latest report is the aspirational goal to, at some point in the future, make their products entirely from recycled goods. Apple wants to stop digging in the earth.
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“It sounds crazy, but we’re working on it. We’re moving toward a closed-loop supply chain. One day we’d like to be able to build new products with just recycled materials, including your old products.”
I spent some time reading the various spins on this position around the Internet and I think it’s a mistake to look at this as some hippie-lipservice from Apple. I think they really mean to pull this off and we’ll see further steps in this direction going forward. Also, I don’t fault Apple for stating their intention to do something they still haven’t entirely figured out how to pull off. I think the fact that Apple is publicly working on this will encourage other big tech companies to do the same and maybe they’ll even collaborate on finding solutions. Wouldn’t it be great if they pulled it off?