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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."
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
First post and already the site is dead. They must be hosting this from an ipod... or an xserve... Sigh...
The greenpeace link
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
I play my mp3s on a totally organic player made from twigs and mulched hippies.
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.
Since the article site is so clearly slashdotted, here's a related article from MacObserver.com entitled Greenpeace Hazardous Material Report Slams Apple.
Gan Family Homepage
1. Post vague, ominous anti-Apple FUD.
2. As evidence, cite a link that is already down -- people will assume it's slashdotted.
3. People don't know what you're claiming, but a negative cloud surrounds their image of Apple.
4. Next time, they'll buy a Zune! Yeah! (aka: profit)
I am the man with no sig!
It's hard to be sure, since the link is down, but assuming this is the 'Greenpeace report' FUD, they admitted it was all lies over a week ago.
E 0-4A9C-8847-BCE665EE235C.html
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E83D58B3-10
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/7f91513b068da1341 2b8a019e07b1b51/index.html
mirrordot
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Apple users should all move to san francisco where they can enjoy smelling their own farts.
So Apple realized they suck at environmentally-friendly products, and now they're trying fix it. Would it have been better had Apple done nothing?
Yes, their motive is not altruistic; it's mostly marketing. Apple is a for-profit corporation, after all. Is a focus on image something new for Apple? Or for any company? Not really.
"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.
--
make install -not war
Yes.
Statistics from Wikipedia: $360 million revenue, 1800 employees, estimated 2.8M supporters.
Whatever you think about Greenpeace, the fact is that they're far from being insignificant.
About the the inconsistencies and outright lies in Greenpeace' report read this, this and this.
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Now, several weeks later, an article is posted referencing some guy's blog who has just now discovered the Greenpeace report and wants to pontificate on why Steve Jobs mentioned environmental concerns in his keynote. Why is this on Slashdot? It's old news, and it's been proven FUD.
Something that might be interesting, though, is whether or not Steve added the environmental bit to the speech because he was miffed at the obviously biased greenpeace report. He probably wanted to get Apple's concern for the environment into the press releases, which he succeeded at doing. This helped overwhelm any bad press Apple may have gotten earlier. Jobs knows his shit, and his small blurb about packaging achieved just the result he was looking for.
So Jobs claims Apple is being more green in its business practices, and this guy throws around some sort of low-end consipiracy theory of the "real" reasons Apple is going green, and then at the end of his article says he wishes Apple would be more green in its business practices. wtf?
RTFM; please, I beg you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The "52% less volume" nano packaging sounds like an impressive statistic, but if one takes a closer look, it will become clear that this is just an inflated number that was quoted to sound good.
1.) The Nano packaging is quite small as it is. Volume is not the major factor when calculating the fossil fuel required to ship these things from the asian sweatshops to the apple stores around the world. Weight is the key factor.
2.) The heaviest part of a nano package is the nano itself. I don't own a nano, but my shuffle (a gift from an employer) came with an overgrown instruction manual, which was actually the heaviest part of that package. I imagine that the nano contains a similar manual. The outer packaging materials were awfully light compared to the contents tiny contents.
3.) Volume and surface area (and thus, packaging weight) do not vary linearly. A 52% reduction in overall volume does not equal even half a reduction in packaging weight.
If the reduction in package weight due to this green-ification were even remotely significant, Jobs would have quoted that number. Instead, he got us all to ooh, and ah at a big, insignificant number.
**rethinking here**
i suppose that a 52% reduction in volume does mean that they can ship these things across the ocean in about half as many containers. If the weight of a container's worth of nano boxes is insignificant in comparison to the weight of the actual container, then perhaps my previous argument is incorrect since the additional container weight will be saved. However, if the weight of the nano boxes is significant, then we're still only seeing a fossil fuel efficiency increase of 20-30%. Don't get me wrong, that's nothing to sneeze at, but I wish they'd quote a number with REAL meaning, rather than the bigger, but insignificant, number.
This all reminds me of a car commercial in San Antonio (where dumb math rules) that advertises, "Did you know that for every mile per hour you drive over 60, your fuel prices go up by 13 cents per gallon." (Disclaimer: My memory of the quote probably suffers minor inconsistencies with the actual quote, but the I took care not to change the concept at all.) Everytime I see that commercial, I just want to call them up and ask how they arrived at that $0.13/gallon figure.
"I threw up my hands in disgust and wondered if it had been such a good idea to have eaten my hands in the first place."
Yeah, Greenpeace apologized for using bad data and revised the report. They were jumping on apple for the publicity. http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/ABC6DFDA-9DE 9-4EA8-A269-65EAAB628676.html
FUD.