How Steve Jobs Got Green Overnight

Francois writes "At Apple's last special event, Steve Jobs insisted on how environment friendly Apple's new iPod packagings are supposed to be. I don't think he's ever gone that route before. 'We've got some new packagings for the new Nano as well. And it's 52% less volume. This turns out to be an environmentally great thing. Because it dramatically reduces the amount of fossil fuels we have to spend to move these things around the planet.' Not only is it obvious they shrank the packaging to reduce the cost of shipping around the planet and sell lower than the Zune, but furthermore: there's a reason why he insisted that much, and it's not so very nice."

Comments

Re:Bogus

[vadim_t]

Why bogus?

Let's say you release mercury into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have poisoned fish, and lots of poisoned people who ate that fish, it'll have had a great effect on the ecology of the area...

So I understand Greenpeace's idea as "Even if we're not sure right now, let's be careful with unknown chemicals now, lest we have to figure it out the hard way".

There are actual examples of why being paranoid is a good thing. For instance, Thalidomide

Righteous

[Doc Ruby]

"It recognises that such proof of harm may never be possible, at least until it is too late to avoid or reverse the damage done"

emphasis mine.

They simply say that when evidence says some chemicals are risky, we should eliminate its use, even if proof of the harmful extent is impossible before it does the damage at risk.

You know, the way you avoid getting killed, even though no one can prove that you're going to hell.

The entire prudence of this Precautionary Principle rests on how to evaluate the evidence of risk. Once that's established, of course you stop before you might break something. Every 5 year old learns that. It's time we stopped letting our corporations work like bulls in our china shop.