Welcome Back: Apple Rejoins EPEAT
Congratulations, Apple, and thank you for reaffirming your environmental commitment. Last week, we reported that Apple had dropped out of the EPA green consumer electronics standard, the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT). After a week of media attention and a strong public outcry, Apple announced today that they have re-signed with EPEAT.
“I recognize that this was a mistake,” Apple Vice President of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield said of the decision to leave EPEAT, in an open letter to customers. “Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.” Robert Frisbee, EPEAT CEO, also published an open letter on their site.
Companies like Apple are generally loathe to admit errors. So we applaud their willingness to apologize to their rightly appalled customers.
Apple has added text to the Retina MacBook Pro product page claiming that it “achieved a Gold rating,” but it’s important to know that the Retina MacBook is not yet officially EPEAT certified. EPEAT works on a self-declaration system, backed by after-the-fact verification. Basically, that means Apple can submit products to the registry and have them listed on the site before the products have been reviewed by anyone at EPEAT, either on paper or in person. The MacBook Pro with Retina Display and other products released last month are all listed as Gold certified, but that only means Apple has declared those products as such.
Apple’s declaration claims that the Retina MacBook meets section 4.3.1.3 of the EPEAT standard, “Easy disassembly of external enclosure.” Based on our teardown, we are skeptical. Here’s the easy disassembly section of the standard: “All disassembly for recycling purposes can be done exclusively with commonly available tools or by hand.” In the Retina MacBook, neither the battery nor the display can be separated from the rest of the case by hand or with common tools.
The Retina MacBook is currently under surveillance, the second part of the three-part EPEAT verification procedures. It may not achieve the Gold rating—EPEAT has removed products before during verification, EPEAT CEO Robert Frisbee told FastCompany. But until EPEAT finishes the review, all is speculation.
For now, we join NPR, San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee, and millions of environmentally conscious Apple fans in cheering Apple’s return to EPEAT.
Comments
After you folks threw such a hissy fit, I’m sure Apple has been dying for your approval. For now.
That’s good to know.
Now when is iFixit going to move it’s site away from Amazon EC2, one of the dirtiest, most coal-reliant and opaque cloud service providers according to Greenpeace?
Every little bit helps and all that jazz.
I actually didn’t know that about Amazon—could you provide a reference for me?
Amazon’s technical innovation has been very helpful for us with load spikes, and we do buy carbon offsets for our servers. But I’m certainly not happy about coal powered servers.
I don’t care how Apple makes it’s MacBook Pro as long as I can enjoy porn on the awesome retina display.
It’s only going to be able to run Apple’s latest OS for about four or five years anyway, so that’s as long as it needs to last before it’s obsolete.
@Lance, Obsolete is not the same as worthless. Computers get huge value for as long as they run, demonstrated by people still using some computers today much older than 4 or 5 years, just go to a poor town’s library where they use 15 year old computers. If we make our best computers now last longer, the distant future could be great computers everywhere.
Kyle, please see this page for stats:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/publications/Campaign-reports/Climate-Reports/How-Clean-is-Your-Cloud/
Side note: as long as Apple continues to offer their own recycling services, and can recycle their own equipment effectively, I don’t think that ‘ease of disassembly’ is important to measure for their products, in terms of environmental impact.
Kyle, thanks for considering changing your web provider away from coal-powered clouds.
The reference by Wes is good as an overview, but here’s a more detailed table:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/publications/climate/2012/iCoal/Facilities%20Table.pdf
I would recommend you seek EPA Green Power Partnership listed hosting companies, who at least offset their CO2 emissions. But even better would be to search for “renewable energy hosting” as there are plenty out there.
Looking forward to see you moving to clean energy soon.
Coal powered servers? I have this mental image of a fireman on a steam locomotive shoveling coal into the back of a server.
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