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

Bogus

[BWJones]

First, while I have been an occasional supporter of Greenpeace, this study is of dubious quality. Specifically, they base their analysis primarily on what they term "the Precautionary Principle" which they define on their website as "In the context of chemicals management, it means that when (on the basis of available evidence) the use of a chemical or groups of chemicals may harm human health or the environment, action to eliminate the use of the chemical(s) should be taken - even if the full extent of harm has not yet been fully established scientifically. 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.

Additionally, they make no evidence or justification on how they establish their weightings of their criteria to determine ranking.

Re:Bogus

[vadim_t]

Ah, but see, that's exactly the problem.

Kelsey (the FDA scientist that evaluated thalidomide) had an amazing luck: She was given something that was actually very harmful. She was pressured by both the company and her superiors to just approve it, but she didn't give in. She became a hero when the truth was known.

However, if it turned out to have been actually harmless, she'd have very possibly been demoted instead. Very few people would have seen it as a job well done in that case.

That's the problem really, being careful is a very, very good thing as the case of thalidomide shows. But people only understand that when they see an example in action. Had it been harmless, she'd have been seen as annoying and stubborn instead, if she remained with the FDA chances are further objections from her would be ignored, and perhaps something even worse would have been approved without oversight.

The gatorade example is bad, anyway. Gatorade, AFAIK, doesn't contain anything very strange, and an isotonic solution is made of completely normal things (water, salt, sugar, orange juice or banana IIRC). Now if you've got some new ingredient that was made in a lab, I'd rather wait than risk being poisoned.

Apple should migrate to a new system

[bestinshow]

E.g., build and assemble in China, package in target country.

This does go against their direct shipping to the customer from the factory system they currently operate.

However the small packaging for the nano is a good first step. Also the turnover on Apple computer hardware tends to be less than PC hardware - people will keep an Apple running for a year or two more than a PC in general. Of course there will those of us running 12 year old SparcStations as print servers and old P200s as routers, but generally people replace PCs when the old one gets slow for whatever reason. Lower turnover means less hardware being recycled overall.

Re:Aha...

[MightyYar]

That's the same link that's been discussed on /. over the last couple of weeks. It has been pointed out numerous times that Greenpeace is not critical of Apple for environmental infractions, but because Apple isn't playing with Greenpeace. Apple did not submit enough (any?) information to Greenpeace for them to make an educated decision. We can argue whether Apple should or should not play with Greenpeace, but I don't think that it's proper to say that "Apple is not as environmentally friendly as Dell."

Re:More information from a non-/.ed site...

[PygmySurfer]

The Greenpeace article is of dubious quality. Apparently, they even ignored their own lab testing, deciding instead to slam Apple. They even made a nifty little site to trash Apple, not only ripping off the apple.com design, but apparently a script as well (Apple's version).

To me, Greenpeace seems about as trustworthy as PETA at the moment.

Re:Weeks old FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, is that ENTIRE website paid for by Apple? the whole right side of the article is repeating iTunes Music Store advertisements!

Steve Jobs and environmental issues

[metamatic]

I guess all the Windows users at Slashdot who've suddenly discovered the Mac won't remember, but for years Apple used to ship all their machines in unbleached recycled cardboard boxes. They would put a flyer inside explaining why the computer was in a brown box.

Then Jobs returned to Apple, and suddenly everything had to be in glossy boxes, so it looked cool.

So yeah, I believe that Apple under Jobs has a bad environmental record.

Re:Righteous

[Doc Ruby]

Do you have a citation of Greenpeace opposing a specific project with no evidence of risk, just the absence of evidence of safety, as you described? Because their policy that we're discussing explicity says that action should be taken on available evidence.

So there's yet another layer being conflated into bashing Greenpeace. There's evidence, risk, and harm. Their policy says evidence of risk, even without evidence of harm, means we shouldn't use the risky chemicals. Which sounds like a completely sensible policy, that we all use in our own lives. But if Greenpeace acts outside that policy, against chemicals (or, by extension, other products) without even evidence of risk, then there's a different argument, about whether Greenpeace even follows its own policy.

FWIW, "head in the sand" describes people who ignore risk as well as people who fear it despite evidence its harm is negligible. And our litigious/risk-averse society is commensurately full of irresponsible harm and ignored risks. Mostly to the benefit of chemical corps which risk and harm us with impunity. The unnecessary lawsuits are mostly exploiting oversimplification of even basic complexities like evidence/risk/harm evaluation. And the risk aversion is much more characteristic of corporations than of humans, as you can tell from the balance of lawsuits.