kellie

AppleZulu said:

I still don't get the fuss over the Mother Nature skit. I thought it was an amusing gag, and it emphasized the message about their multiple approaches to better corporate environmental stewardship.

This is certainly something to use for marketing. More people will consider this positively when making choices about purchasing electronics gear than will get cranky about Apple being "woke." 

I think it's also something they should emphasize to cause other companies to follow in their footsteps. Apple is actually planning the entire life cycle of their products, reducing unneeded waste in production and distribution, creating a market for recycled materials from their own products, and planning not just how to put their products together, but how to efficiently take them back apart in order to recover those materials for re-use. This is the opposite of what most other corporations have been doing for decades.

Even as environmental regulations have forced companies to stop dumping many manufacturing and production chemicals directly into the environment, corporations have continually found other ways to externalize their costs by handing their waste over to consumers, leaving it to them to dump into the environment. Overuse of plastics, single-use items, unnecessary packaging and more are all examples of corporations reducing their own costs, while shifting them to consumers to deal with the waste. They stamp some of it with a recycle symbol and then let consumers and taxpayers assume the cost of collecting, processing and attempting to re-sell recycled materials. 

For example, once upon a time, Coke, Pepsi and others bottled their drinks in glass, and consumers could return those to the store for credit, the bottlers took them back, washed them and reused them again. Then they switched to plastic, initially without even pretending to care about recycling or reuse. Recycling came later, but it's up to municipalities to pay for collection and recycling (or consumers outside city limits to pay for this directly), and Coke and Pepsi are extremely limited in how much recycled plastic they buy and turn back into bottles. So in essence they dump huge quantities of plastic on consumers and leave it to us to figure out what to do with it all. It's obscene, when you spend two minutes thinking about it.

So why again should anyone be irritated about a five minute sketch about Apple actually taking responsibility for what they put out into the world?