For the second time this year, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has broken the long period of silence that has usually passed between corporate product introductions to address a matter of concern to the Internet community.
In February, Jobs called for an end to Digital Rights Management technology in the music industry, to the general approval of online observers and when British music label EMI announced that it was dropping DRM, Jobs and his company got considerable credit.
Today, with environmental practices increasingly becoming a competitive issue for high tech companies, Jobs addressed criticism that Apple wasn’t green enough, a charge that Greenpeace recently made.
Steve Jobs disputed that characterization and pledged to communicate about the issue more effectively in the future.
Upon investigating Apple’s current practices and progress towards these goals, I was surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas.
Whatever other improvements we need to make, it is certainly clear that we have failed to communicate the things that we are doing well.
Source: Steve Jobs – Apple Blog
Referring to Apple’s policy of silence, Jobs said that Apple preferred to talk about what it had accomplished rather than trumpet future plans but when it came to Apple’s commitment to the environment, he said:
Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and they’re right to do so. They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business, so today we’re changing our policy.
Jobs listed several toxic materials used in electronics manufacturing that Apple had phased out, or was in the process of phasing out. Lead, a component of cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, is one example.
In mid-2006, Apple became the first company in the computer industry to completely eliminate CRTs,” he said. “The effect has been stunning — our first CRT-based iMac contained 484 grams of lead; our current third-generation LCD-based iMac contains less than 1 gram of lead.
Jobs pointed out that Dell, Gateway, Hewlett Packard and Lenovo still ship CRT displays.
Greenpeace today issued a statement endorsing Apple’s commitment to being green. “We are cheering!” said the environmental organization. “Steve Jobs has decided to bring us closer to the greener apple that Mac users all over the world have been asking for.”
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Good to know.