Greepeace vs. Apple

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Greepeace’s latest target, Apple.

We love Apple. Apple knows more about “clean” design than anybody, right? So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned? A cutting edge company shouldn’t be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals. That’s why we Apple fans need to demand a new, cool product: a greener Apple.

Now I don’t know anything about how environmentally friendly or unfriendly Apple products are, but I do know there is a problem with the way Greenpeace is presenting their cause. Rather then restate the problem, here’s the email I sent to them.

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I have some questions/doubts about your Apple page.

Your claim:

>So why do Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range
>contain hazardous substances that other companies have agreed to abandon?

Yet by looking at the attached image from your web site, you show all
non-current, sometimes close to 10 year old products. Are you asking
Apple to invent a time machine, go back in time, bring back modern
technology to create more environmentally friendly then? It seems as
though your saying, “HP/Dell etc now have cleaned up their act now,
why didn’t Apple do it years ago?” which will appear to anyone as
nothing more then you attacking Apple just because they are a better
name associated with, “cool” because you will get more of ‘a rise’ out
of the audience.

Since you explicitly say that is not the case (>Of course Apple isn’t
the only company that needs to change its ways. But in a recent
Greenpeace scorecard, Apple ranked lower than HP, Dell, Nokia, and
Sony…) you would be best to show modern products and say how they
are bad rather then showing old products and saying how Apple is still
bad today. It would be no different from me showing a picture
depicting slavery from many years ago, and saying, “look, white people
are bad”; you’d need to show something happening today to make
claims about today.

I want all computers to be perfect in every way possible just like the
next guy, but if your claim is modern products are still not up to
par, you need to display modern products not being up to par in a way
other then just using their screens to show 10-year old products in
order to make a sound argument. It reminds me of when your method of
choice to protest Japanese whaling was to attempt to kill Japanese
whalers by ramming your Iceberg buster boat into their whaling boat.
No matter how good your cause may be, if your execution of protest is
worse then what you are protesting, you’ll only make yourself look
bad.

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As I said, I don’t know anything about Apple and the environment, but I do know you’re not going to get me on your side by showing products from many years ago (millennia past in the computer world) and using it as evidence for a problem now. I hope they respond with graphics that have modern equipment in them because I very much do like my Apple products. But when they moved their factories from Taiwan to China, their stock went down in my book, and this would have the same effect as well. Naturally any response received will be posted here as well.

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