Apple pulls products from government-backed 'green electronics' list - Page 4

This is very true. Indeed, the right words in-between should be much stronger: it should say, 'because of.'

The DDT ban probably killed more people than Stalin did.

PS: I did not see post #107 before posting ths.
Edited by anantksundaram - 7/7/12 at 5:06pm

This post has about the same moral foundation as a eugenicist claiming that all he was doing was 'natural selection.'

 

There is a Big difference between local chambers of commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce. The US Chamber is an anti-worker, anti-family, group of elitist fascists that want the vast majority of us who's jobs they don't ship abroad to be slaves of commerce. Local chambers are usually not un-American billionaires and are more down to earth.

Hey... Corporations are people too! /s

Since Apple has dropped the EPEAT standard I decided to visit the manufacturer to whom I would go to as an alternative to Apple. They are System 76. They make high end computers for less than the other American manufacturers because they use Linux as the operating system.

System 76 does not have any EPEAT certification listed on any of the products I viewed. They do have something called 80 Plus. It is a system that regulates the amount of power that goes to the power supply to ensure it isn't using any more power than is needed at any one time. It is supposed to reduce energy consumption. Apple had a power saving feature built into some of its products in the past. I haven't studied their product literature in a while to see if it is still a feature.

The benefits I would receive from owning a System 76 product is the ability to access the internal parts. They are also made in the USA which I like. The downside is that there are no sophisticated presentation software programs on Linux equal to Powerpoint or Keynote. If there is such a program out their I really would like to know about it. Libre Office needs to improve some to equal the others.

Aww, that's a shame. Now how about instead of insulting me you explain your meaning. Also take a gander around, as melgross made posts just today.

There is a big difference. What are your credentials to make such a claim?

OTOH, 97% of climate scientists agree that human activities are causing global warming. (The call it climate change because you get people who don't understand the concept that even if the planet as a whole is warming up that some areas might be cooler for a short time period). That's 97% of the people who have the expertise, the tools, and the experience to know what they're talking about.
http://junksciencecom.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/pnas-2010-anderegg-1003187107-1.pdf

Or, better yet, simply shoot the ones who are wasting energy. That would be even more effective. /s

Part of what makes Apple successful is their industrial design. If they started putting other considerations first, such as recyclability, they would ultimately end up with products that look like design by committee. It would be the beginning of the end of Apple.

 

 

Well, Apple decided to do this. No one forced them to. One has to assume they knew what the consequences might be but went ahead anyway. So it's not really a setback in the sense that Apple did this voluntarily to themselves. Apple is not stupid and something is in the works behind the scenes. You can bet your paycheck on it.

I thought the post was funny, and you're proving his point. You're a moderator- you don't need to get in the mud and argue with him. Shouldn't you be above it?
All crap, all the time. Lol. It's catchy.

 

It has no moral foundation or lack of it. It has scientific foundation.

 

DDT was losing effectiveness and continued massive use would have rendered it completely harmless to mosquitoes, while remaining toxic to animals higher up in the food chain. What part of that is so hard to comprehend?

 

Those millions of dead people are so much right-wing fiction. DDT was banned in the United States and a few other advanced countries, but use of DDT continued elsewhere, though curtailed, precisely because it does not biodegrade and becomes ineffective quickly. Mosquitoes resistant to DDT appeared over 60 years ago, in India, and are now present all over the world.

 

You are parroting a fictional, fact-free story invented by the chemical industry to paint greens as immoral. It's bull, and people who favor turning finite resources into trash have no moral standing to begin with.

 

No, it didn't. Nothing could be more false. For one thing DDT hasn't even been banned worldwide. It's been banned in countries like the United States, where people don't die from malaria.

 

Not only that, mosquitoes quickly became resistant to DDT, so it has been of very limited use for decades, except to contaminate habitat.

 

Not at all. Design is trivial if you only care about one thing. Design should be done by a small group with clear direction, that's true. But the design objectives can be whatever the company wants. Unsustainable design, in this day and age, is simply bad design.

 

Apple's been there, done that. The decade of malaise. Being unable to ship Copland. Chasing technology rabbit holes like Newton and OpenDoc.

Scratch my original speculation about Apple planning its own recycling centers capable of handling the R-MBP. The cynic in me suggests the following motivation instead:

 

Apple may be pulling previously EPEAT-certified models because (as reported elsewhere) some large customers have policies to buy EPEAT-certified equipment preferentially. If the R-MBP isn't certified but other MBP models are, customers may have difficulty circumventing corporate policy in order to buy the R-MBP.

 

(Apologies to anyone who may already have written it.)

Agreed. We have another case of Apple having thought something through very carefully but characteristically refusing to air their side of the situation in public. it is inconceivable that they would have made such a move without Tim Cook and the management team thoroughly discussing it with the Apple Board of Directors which of course includes Al Gore. We certainly don't know the whole story. Just look at the latest keynote at 42.40. They are supremely committed to environmental responsibility.

 Pay grade? So a limitless supply of crayons makes you the richest kid on the block. Mommy must be proud of you. Just remind her to keep them away from the radiator when she tucks you in at night.

 

I was being polite when I suggested that you were my equal, god forbid, in the event that I become your equal, I hope that my living will results in the life support machine being turned off.

 

I can only imagine that you were distracted by getting another crayon stuck up you nose (again). How else would me explaining the transition from the term "global warming" to "climate change" be missed construed as me commenting on the efficiency, or otherwise, of DDT.

 

That is somehow worse than all of the knee jerk responses that must defend Apple at any cost? Which is ironically exactly where everything in your post beyond the first paragraph went.  Good job.

 

I doubt you really know what is happening in this green thing. I am no expert but I feel that anything is recyclable because there is money to be made from it. I believe the scape sellers exporting every make of used computers to China to be recycle.

 

You have ben reading too much into those companies with great PR on their green program.

 

Btw do you really believe the plastic used in a dell pc or laptop is recyclable?

 

One more thing don't drive a car or ride a bus and yes don't buy anything which may use coal or oil in their manufacturing process.

Yours made the most sense than all the boys who cry wolf.

 

Totally worth quoting. 

 

In my opinion, it reflects very badly on AI to have an immoderate mederator who spews insults and nastiness in practically every post.

 

YOu may be on to something there. 

 

But whether or not this specific theory is correct, it is certain that Apple pulled out in a move to increase profits.  Any time one wonders why Apple took any action, the explanation is the same at its base.  Everything Apple does is designed to take more money out of consumer's pockets and to give it to Wall Street.

Oh, look.  More government.  This is exactly why we can't build anything in this country anymore.   

This really has nothing to do with them being green or talking about it.

It's about abiding by a particular standard for 'being green'. That's all. EPEAT is about being able to open the computer with standard screwdrivers etc to pull out the battery and toss the rest in a shredder. But is that really the best way to recycle. Might it actually be better to strip the components apart and do it that way. Is shredding everything together better than perhaps the machine going back to Apple to be disassembled and the enclosure somehow melted down to be pressed into a new enclosure, the rare earth metals melted down etc. And if this way a step towards Apple offering an incentive like they do for iPods, that wouldn't be a bad thing.

And the govt thing is a bit moot cause Congress and Obama can change those rules if they want to.

They already have a place. Their repair depots. They would have to have the tools to replace batteries in repairs.

The issue with EPEAT is that Apple doesn't use common screws etc that you or I can remove with something we picked up at Joes Hardware. That's it. That's what got them off the list. It doesn't count if you can go to an Apple store and pay a tech $10 to remove the battery for you. Doesn't count if they ship it to a repair center to have it done. If I can't do it right now myself, it's not EPEAT standard

So Obama writes a new order, as do the schools. Issue over

YOU can't, doesn't equal that Apple can't

You drop Apple over this lack of EPEAT, to go to a computer that lacks EPEAT

That's logical

To me this seems much ado about nothing. And the only people we've heard from are an EPEAT and iFixit spokesperson - certainly not objective, neutral parties. iFixit is just po'd because they can't sell a service. I don't trust their motives.

And just because something isn't EPEAT certified doesn't mean it's not recyclable. Again much ado about nothing. How many people purchased a Mac because of the EPEAT certification? My guess is not many.

How many people can even have a broad understand of what EPEAT is or what the acronym EPEAT stands for? I could have given the former and their rating nomenclature (not what the levels mean) but I couldn't have told you what EPEAT stood for.

 

That's only for you, Zazzles.

You should really take a half day out of your important life and visit, say, the local dump. Many of the hills one sees are mountains of garbage. Stay and watch while truckloads come and dump their loads. You will first enter a large secured site, and drive miles of dirty roads as you climb the "mountain". The dirty underneath your car wasn't there a decade ago, but excavated from deepening holes and dumped on top of garbage, then spread out by heavy equipment which "buries" the garbage, then flattened to make a pathway for your car and loaded trucks as they climb higher up the garbage mountain. There at the top of you will drive over partially buried bricks, clothes, coat hangers, children's dolls, decaying refuse in black plastic bags with wire ties, All day, the heavy machinery is plowing and moving the newly deposited garbage around, while more garbage comes along with truckloads of excavated dirt. It's loud; maybe 100 decibels or more as the machines do their work moving the new dirt on top of new garbage then packing them down to make a plateau of garbage, your garbage. Next week, go back again, and the garbage you dumped the week before will have been buried, the garbage mountain just a little higher than the week before; the road you traveled just a little bit steeper, until they decide to make a new road up to the new plateau. 

 

Think of what you are seeing, and image how this area was and how much life it contained before we acquired it for a dump. You will see nothing living there, and life will not return. Apple's genius will be long forgotten; the dumps will remain our lasting legacy. 

EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) is a comprehensive environmental rating that helps identify greener computers and other electronic equipment (1) which is managed by the Green Electronics Council, a program of the International Sustainable Development Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. (2)

EPEAT is not a government program although EPEAT was conceived and developed through the collaboration of stakeholders from the business, advocacy, government and academic arenas during the presidency of George W. Bush with funding and support via an executive order requiring that all federal agencies satisfy 95% of their purchase requirements with EPEAT-registered products. (3)

More importantly, the preceding illustrates that EPEAT is not a government program.


Apple states, "Our goal in 2010 was to achieve a worldwide recycling rate of 70 percent. (To calculate this rate, we use a measurement proposed by Dell that assumes a seven-year product lifetime. The weight of the materials we recycle each year is compared to the total weight of the products Apple sold seven years earlier.) We met and exceeded that goal in 2010. This far surpasses the last reported numbers from Dell and HP, which were each lower than 20 percent. In 2011, Apple global recycling once again exceeded our 70 percent goal, and we are confident that we will maintain this level through 2015." (4)



The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) assumes that 40 percent of commercial computers reach their end-of-life after three years, another 40 percent after five years, and the remaining 20 percent after seven years "... based on information from the International Association of Electronics Recyclers (IAER 2006), surveys of computer reuse (Lynch 2001), personal communications with industry experts (DuBravac 2006, Powers 2006), and assumptions about the length of time that commercial products are held in storage ..." (5)

The EPA estimates "that in 2009:438 million new electronic products were sold; 5 million short tons of electronic products were in storage; 2.37 million short tons of electronic products were ready for end-of-life management; and 25 percent of these tons were collected for recycling." (5)


The approach implemented by Apple appears to be far more successful in reducing waste and reusing components.


1. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. EPEAT Home. EPEAT. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
2. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. About the Green Electronics Council. Green Electronics Council. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
3. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. EPEAT Timeline. EPEAT. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
4. Unattributed. No Published Date provided. Apple Recycling Program. Apple. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
5. Unattributed. May 2011. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Resource Conservation and Recovery Electronics Waste Management in the United States Through 2009. EPA. Retrieved 8 July 2012.

I have been an Apple fan for a while, and i have been directly or indirectly been responsible for quite a few Apple purchases, through friends, family or work. I am however starting to have a problem with what Apple is becoming. Put simply, I think the bean counters are gaining control of the company. They are getting too greedy and complacent. The glued in batteries, non upgradeable memory, and proprietary ssd hard drives are really just the last straw. I also find that my iPad feels like a controlled prison. I have al ready purchased an Android phone and I will likely find other alternatives for my next laptop purchase. I am angry at Apple.

Okay, bye.

The thing that concerns me is that the Govt and many large corporations require their purchases to be EPEAT certified. It really sucks to be blocked out of a whole market like that.

Sucks for whom?

Apple's doing fine.