Examining Apple’s Sustainability Commitments: Beyond the Buzzwords

A bustling, bright, and modern conference room. Panorama windows overlooking green plains. People seem nervous, rehearsing their lines — even Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple. The light in the conference room dims. Members of the team look up. Tim turns to the window. Outside, the trees sway in the wind. Mother Nature, played by Octavia Spencer, suddenly sits at the table

By Wilhelm Wanecek

Every year the same: as the leaves turn yellow, tech bros crowd for the Apple Event, where the company presents its new line-up of products. While less of a media spectacle than in the age of Steve Jobs and the first iPhones, the September event remains an institution for investors and consumers alike — a presentation of the technical features of new products interwoven with Apple’s vision of the future.

This year, emphasis was put on the company’s sustainability initiatives, neatly packaged in a short film portraying a corporate responsibility meeting including the CEO Tim Cook and the VP of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson and — of course — Mother Nature. In the 5-minute marketing video, Mother Nature progresses from impatient and sceptical to reluctantly impressed as the team presents Apple’s work on “doubling down” on their sustainability initiatives.

On the surface, it’s impressive. All Apple offices are carbon neutral — using “a mix of clean energy and eliminating greenhouse emissions”. “More products” are shipped by “ocean rather than air, which reduces transportation emissions by 95 percent”. Water usage has been reduced by sixty-three million gallons — no, billion gallons — a statement prompting “serene classical music” to play.

The finale of the ad shows the line-up of the new, “carbon neutral” Apple Watches

And it’s not just a reduction of negative impacts. Jackson explains they “aim to permanently remove carbon from the atmosphere” by planting forests in Brazil and Paraguay, restoring mangroves in Colombia, and grasslands in Kenya. The finale of the ad is the introduction of the 9th generation Apple Watch, where a logo with five green petals and the words “Carbon Neutral” appear below the devices. Mother Nature’s lips subtly turn up. “By 2030, all Apple devices will have a net zero climate impact”, Tim states.

The highlight of the Apple Event was the launch of the iPhone 15. (Source: https://apple.com)

Impressive, but only on the surface. The event’s true highlight was the launch of iPhone 15 — another product to be produced in the millions. Most contemporary microelectronics, including the various “iDevices”, have footprints vastly outweighing the products themselves. A 120-gram mobile phone typically requires over 70 kilograms of raw materials, including several rare earth elements (REE). In scrutinising the Political Ecology of the Apple AirPods, Sy Taffel from Massey University outlines the environmental and social impacts of such extraction:

[T]he extraction and purification of REE is a complex process which produces vast amounts of toxic waste; ‘9,600 to 12,000 cubic metres […] of waste gas – containing dust concentrate, hydrofluoric acid, sulfur dioxide, and sulfuric acid – are released with every ton of rare metals that are mined. Approximately 75 cubic metres […] of acidic wastewater, plus about a ton of radioactive waste residue are also produced’ (NASA, 2012).

The social and environmental footprints are far from constrained to the extraction of raw materials. Apple has on several occasions been critiqued for subjecting workers to unsafe and deeply unjust working conditions, even ignoring child- and forced labour, with the manufacturing processes undertaken in China and Vietnam dubbed iSlavery. Global products, yes, but unevenly distributed impacts.

The Apple AirPods, with a life-span of 18-36 months are one of the Apple devices with poor or no repairability. In reviews by iFixit, an internet community helping people repair technology, they both received a repairability score of 0 out of 10. This doesn’t mean they’re difficult or expensive to repair — it means they are impossible to repair, as replacing a component requires cutting open the casing and thus rendering them unusable. Sources: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/AirPods, https://www.ifixit.com/Device/AirPods_Pro

When situating Apple, its production processes, and its products within the capitalist logic it operates in, this should come as no surprise. Even where Apple manages to decrease the footprints per device, it still requires perpetual economic growth to attract investors and to generate return on investments for its shareholders.

As such, Apple needs to boost margins of each device, sell more units, or create new market segments. Pursuing higher margins risks squeezing workers, and more units produced means a larger footprint. And usually planned obsolescence — a customer that only buys a phone every 10 years is not a good customer. Apple will also need to continue increasing the demand in new product segments. Taffel again: “prior to the introduction of AirPods, wireless earbud sales were less than one million units per year (Hunn, 2016), indicating that in the five years following their introduction, the market for wireless earbuds has grown over 160-fold”.

Essential then to the narrative of Apple as a socially and environmentally responsible company is the ability to “offset” its impacts, sometimes explicitly (as in the ad, mentioning “permanently eliminating carbon from the atmosphere”) and sometimes implicitly (e.g. baked into the term “carbon neutral”).

Apple’s VP of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson in their latest marketing video on Apple’s Sustainability initiatives

There is a lot to be said about the falsehood in carbon offsets and carbon credits, as “more than 90% of rainforest carbon offsets by the biggest certifier are worthless” and the “majority of offset projects that have sold the most carbon credits are ‘likely junk’”. Beyond outright scams, carbon offset projects risk not living up to their promises, displacing local populations, destroying livelihoods, and incurring land grabs. The new Apple environmental ad has in the week since its release received a lot of criticism for its claims of carbon neutrality (e.g. “Your New Apple Watch Won’t Be Carbon Neutral”).

This is a manifestation of what Political Ecology calls “the economy of repair”. James Fairhead, Melissa Leach and Ian Scoones describe it as the belief “that unsustainable use ‘here’ can be repaired by sustainable practices ‘there’”, allowing “double pricing” of nature: once for its use, and once for its “repair”.

While some may have hoped that carbon offset schemes would hinder the extractivism of companies in the Global North, Fairhead & colleagues explain that, instead, both economies — use and repair — are being maximised to get the “very most out of nature and with maximum efficiency”. To quote Lloyd Alter in ‘Are the new Apple Watches truly “carbon neutral”?’

“The message Apple is sending here to its customers is that this type of overconsumption is still acceptable, even in the era of the climate crisis. Apple wants us to believe that the company and its customers can have the cake and eat it, too. Unfortunately, this is nothing but wishful thinking.”

Apple is not alone in this. In fact, they may even be doing a lot better than their competitors. Yet, without reducing the consumption-driving market expansion strategies that they are currently employing, it is little more than greenwashing.

Does the case of Apple hint at the limits of what measures are available to tech-giants within a capitalist, profit-driven system? I’ll first be impressed by Apple the day they join companies such as Patagonia in abandoning their profit motives, thereby taking a first step to break free of extractivist imperatives, and unlock meaningful sustainability measures that put people and planet over profit. Until then, “Carbon neutral” remains nothing but greenwashing.

About this blog post:
This blog was created as part of an academic assignment for the course “Political Ecology and Sustainability” within the International Master’s Programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science (LUMES) at the Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS).

Author Bio:
Wilhelm Wanecek is master student at the International Master’s Programme in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science (LUMES)