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We need to hold the vendor accountable, what about the user community?

Cult of Mac.com

Despite touting its green credentials in new TV ads, Apple is ranked fairly low in Greenpeace’s latest survey of green electronics.

Greenpeace’s quarterly green scorecard was released on Wednesday, and while Apple got high marks for reducing toxic chemicals, it got low marks for not supporting global recycling initiatives or using more recycled plastics.

Overall, Apple scored 4.7 out of 10, putting it in the lower half of a pack of 18 electronics manufacturers. Nokia came top with a score of 7.45, and Nintendo came bottom with a score of 1.

Apple has been advertising the green credentials of its new MacBook line in TV ads — proclaiming them the greenest laptops ever.

Greenpeace’s 12th Guide to Greener Electronics ranks tech companies on three main criteria: reducing overall environmental impact, eliminating toxic chemicals, and recycling efforts.

Apple scored higher than rivals like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo, which all came near the bottom for failing to eliminate toxic chemicals like polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardants (BFRs) from their products.

Apple has mostly removed PVCs and BVRs, which Greenpeace rewarded with high marks.

We need to hold vendors to their manufacturing and distribution processes, we need to get across how small changes can have long term improvements in environmental impact.

Apple/Dell/HP/IBM etc have all been making tremendous improvements in encouraging recycling, in looking at the manufacturing process to reduce impact, I can sense many saying “they could do much better”, of course, but we need to stay on message, change the message from one of “you’re rubbish, you didn’t do this, that or this”, to one of “that’s fantastic, you’ve changed so much, can you also look at…”, even in terms of service delivery the response is transforming.

People don’t like to be told what to do, how to run their businesses, indeed it’s easy to sit and say but why, let us as a user community, a vendor community and global community establish where we need to be getting too, what as end users we can do, what the vendors can do and what the core requirements of the regions are, how we address them.

Interestingly we’re focusing on the future, is there any work being done on the retrospective? Those mountains of 286’s I keep reading about? Any movement to collect and recycle them? Any movement to connect developing worlds with appropriate, affordable efficient technologies?

if you wish say, can we look at doing the following:

• Make it outrageously simple to recycle a pc/laptop – whether it’s using local government/organization as the drop off/collection point – but crucially just make it easy, we’re almost there, but there’s still a way to go. Can I not simply phone a vendor, get a box and have them collect it?
• Generate revenue through encouraging hardware refresh and recycling with the end user in mind:
  • Link inventories to the end user, so that they can see the cost of upgrade isn’t nearly as high as perceived.
  • It is possible to buy a refurbished desktop for £100, with that in mind, how many people would upgrade their old Pentium ii?
  • Recognize that a newer pc should be more efficient, at the very least, more recyclable and bring lower costs to the end user.
  • Consider that old issue of money – if I recycle my G4 Powerbook, any chance of a discount on a new MacBook – even a free copy of Apple iWork?
• Question the amount of users collecting old pcs that are still running or powered off
  • How effecient am I if I have 8 pcs at home?
  • How about home virtualization for the home user?
• Engage with end users (home/business) how we can be more efficient in simple steps, power savings, switching off the pc, using the bios to do this etc.
• Begin and continue a discussion about what can and cannot be recycled. My iPod headphones, the left ear doesn’t work, can I recycle them in an Apple store or do they go in the bin? If I don’t know, they’ll go in the bin.

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