In 2015, Apple looked inward, and after a rather long and complex process involving literally hundreds of employees and consultants was able to draw a line and provide a basis for its energy balance. The company, he found, has a carbon footprint of 25.1 million tons of CO2. 75% depends on the manufacturing activities of its products, 16% on the use of its products, 6% on their transport, a little less than 1% on the recovery of materials, 2% on the movement of the workforce (home-work journeys and business trips), less than 1% from direct emissions. Movements and direct emissions are only the emissions made by the company, while the rest comes from its production, supply and use of the products.
Starting from a clear and measurable basis, you can build an efficient plan, check its progress and update it in case you want to speed up or need to correct some parts. Apple has thus decided to become carbon neutral by 2030, twenty years before the legal requirements. The company has set up a rather complex series of activities, which we had already told in part here, focusing above all on the theme of recycling of materials as well as green energy sources, and which today is enriched with a new aspect.
Together with Conservation International, which provides experience on the green theme, and Goldman Sachs, which instead puts it financially, Apple has created a $ 200 million fund that aims to remove at least one million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, equivalent to the amount of fuel used by over 200,000 passenger vehicles. The interesting thing about this fund, however, is that it is not a charity operation, a non-repayable donation, but an investment based on a financial model that Apple believes is viable and that can help increase investment in forest restoration. . In practice, an accelerator for a “good economy” that pushes the animal instinct of capitalism in the right direction, making it evolve into a culture of the environment that orients it, like a compass, and does not transform it into a mere desire for speculation and enrichment to the detriment of resources and the balance of the planet.
Apple has invested heavily in the environmental sector: the company has in fact also sought a leader who knew how to be both an effective manager but also a symbol of the seriousness of the company’s commitment, and found it in Lisa Jackson, currently deputy president for the environment, for social policies and initiatives, who was Barack Obama’s right-hand man in the White House for the development of environmental policies, one of the best done parts of the first African American president of the United States.
The Restore Fund, as the 200 million fund is called, is also enriched by the experience that the company has gained over years of working on the forests, to have 100% materials made with fibers of sustainable origin for its packages and packages , product boxes that have gone through a very wide range of improvements to minimize their impact and optimize their use. Apple has collaborated with Conservation International to recover forests and spaces in various parts of the world, starting with Colombia, but there are also many activities within the company that impact not only on “corporate emissions” (for years the fig leaf behind which the green reports of multinationals eager to do greenwashing were hidden, indicating virtuous attitudes on marginal aspects of their carbon footprint), but also on the design and manufacturing choices of products.
While Apple works on working forests, productive forests, i.e. those planned and protected so that, within 50-100 years, they produce the right wood with the right environmental impact, it is also committed to revolutionizing its products, the means to make them, the materials. At the presentation in New York of the new MacBook Air line, in fact, Apple had also explained that the aluminum body is made with recycled aluminum thanks to an innovative process, and that then all its aluminum production is free of carbon enrichment. the result of years of chemical research. These are choices that have reduced the impact of new products by more than 50%, which then enter a new circular economy mechanism for large technology multinationals. The same thing for smartphones, which Apple now sells without transformers, in response to the EU’s desire not to increase the volume of e-waste, electronic waste: almost all new mobile phones go to users who replace an old one. become obsolete but whose charger still works perfectly.
The company works on the circular economy, on a “smart” chemistry for its products, on the responsibility of the supply chain, and on climate change, as explained at the bottom of this page of its website.
Forests are now a major target for Apple, which has focused on the role they can play in creating oxygen and reducing the impact of CO2 on the atmosphere. The company will never be able to erase its carbon footprint (to do so it should close or start producing fresh air) but it can reduce it as much as possible and implement compensatory measures (forests) so that the final balance becomes positive. and is no longer negative. And this is only possible thanks to the analysis made at the time by Apple, which managed, with a process that we said rather complex, expensive and necessarily tailor-made (to map the global supply chain of Apple’s suppliers), to map its footprint. . This process is available on the company’s website, in an open and downloadable format, not only to be reviewed by environmental associations and the curious, but also to be read and copied by other companies. The only intellectual property that the company would be happy to give away to the competition.