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Greenpeace Slams Apple For Environmental Record

nandemoari writes "According to a recent advertisement airing on American TV, Apple's new Macbooks (well-received by most technology critics) are 'the world's greenest family of notebooks.' It seems an indication that the Cupertino-based company is increasingly aware of a consumer base that demands green electronics. However, Greenpeace is less than enthused with Apple's overall green performance. In their report (PDF), the environmentalists argue that Apple 'needs to commit to phasing out additional substances with timelines, improve its policy on chemicals and its reporting on chemicals management.'" Ars Technica points out that Greenpeace's research isn't quite up-to-snuff, and it's also worth noting that Greenpeace admitted to targeting Apple for the publicity in the past.

5 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Fuck off, Greenpeace by QuantumG · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Apteras and Zaps both make products that no-one wants. Tesla is at least making a product that people want, even if they can't afford it. The people who were making a product that people both wanted and could afford, took their product off the market because they were afraid it would cannibalize their other product lines.

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    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Re:Trickle down is beneficial by nsayer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Leaving Beans, Nuts, and Fruits as the only source for your diet

    You left out eggs. milk and honey.

    Eggs may or may not count depending on your point of view about protecting the unborn/unhatched, but I have yet to find someone both strongly anti-abortion and insanely vegan. Never mind the fact that most eggs in the store aren't fertilized anyway. But then, if eggs are out, then so are strawberries and pomegranates.

    But milk and honey are truly the only foods that you could truly say can be obtained from the plant and animal kingdom without harming a plant or animal or impinging on its reproduction. It is, however, counting on the animals in question to overproduce for their own needs to supply yours. In other words, living purely on milk and honey puts you in the same category as a leech.

    No, the only meat eaters that are acceptable to militant vegans are scavengers.

    Me? I'd rather eat militant vegans. Long pig. The other white meat.

  3. Re:green by hairyfeet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    And has anyone done a study comparing the failure rates of items created with lead free solder VS lead? Because from what my engineering friends tell me the non lead solder is crap. it doesn't flow evenly, it seems to fail more often, it simply doesn't work nearly as well as the lead according to them. So while insuring a clean environment is a good thing(and recycling the lead would probably work just as well) if the lack of lead in solder joints causes us to end up with giant mounds of e-waste as electronics fail earlier than they need to, then we may very well be "penny wise and pound foolish".

    We need to have consumer electronics that will last. And if that requires lead then either raise the price a little to pay for the recycling or have the manufacturers provide an easy way to drop these items off for recycling. But if we don't look at these situations logically we may end up being buried in "green" e-waste from electronics dying before their time.

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    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
  4. Re:Oh no... I'm going to need a bigger shovel by Admiral+Ag · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You might want to read a bit more about that one. The problem in that case was that the French decided that it would be a good idea to test nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, which mortally pissed off pretty much everyone who lived there. If it was so safe, why couldn't they test the blasted things in France. It wasn't just Greenpeace. The New Zealand government had sent ships to the test site to protest in previous years. Why stand by as some European nonces shit in our back yard?

    European nuclear powers had a well-known history of contempt for people in the South Pacific. Britain, for example, tested nuclear weapons in Australia without bothering to inform the Aboriginals who lived near the test site that they should get out of the way. So you can guess that the French were not popular.

    New Zealand was a supposed ally of France and there are thousands of New Zealanders buried in war cemeteries in France and Belgium, which is where they died helping defend France against invasion. So to have the French security forces commit a terrorist attack and murder on New Zealand soil just because they couldn't hack a rusty old boat sailing up and down near their nuclear test site was in my opinion a bit much.

    The French officials responsible for this are lower than shit. If I had the chance, I would put a bullet in their heads. So would a lot of other people I know.

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    "by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
  5. Apple has always been overhyped by hessian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    1984 - The Mac is friendly, it's the future, lalalala. Reality: 128k machine with 4 pieces of known software.

    1987 - The Mac is more efficient than IBM PCs, it's the future. Reality: It's four times as expensive and people quickly learn windows.

    1995 - The Mac is a better operating system than Windows, it's the future. Reality: holding down the mouse button suspends the entire operating system.

    2000 - The Mac is superior, it uses the PowerPC family of chips and custom hardware. Reality: it's slower and Apple acquiesces to this fact a few years later, making Intel machines.

    2008 - The Mac is superior, it's "green." Reality: it's still a hunk of plastic you chuck in the landfill, and being made by the world's most neurotic computer company, it's more likely to break.

    I used to believe in Apple; eventually I saw that, like most things hyping "hope" and "change," they were marketers and not revolutionaries. They sold a lie.

    Now I prefer the world of open hardware and open source + Windows. I can buy any motherboard I want, and I assemble machines that last years longer than any Macintosh. For people who want the bulk of mainstream software, there's Win XP or Windows Vista (which many people do like), but for those with more experience, there's OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Linux.