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."

Re:Bogus

[vadim_t]

Why bogus?

Let's say you release mercury into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have poisoned fish, and lots of poisoned people who ate that fish, it'll have had a great effect on the ecology of the area...

So I understand Greenpeace's idea as "Even if we're not sure right now, let's be careful with unknown chemicals now, lest we have to figure it out the hard way".

There are actual examples of why being paranoid is a good thing. For instance, Thalidomide [wikipedia.org]

Re:Apple should migrate to a new system

[Ritchie70]

But there still has to be *some* packaging between China and the target company, or you just receive a container full of broken iPods. You could maybe pack them in tighter, but all that packaging would have to be discarded, which is almost certainly more costly than shipping the final packaging from China.
I suppose you could have some sort of trays that hold them, but then the trays would have to be returned to China to be reloaded. Also probably expensive.

Nothing ulterior that I see

[mnemonic_]

From TFA:

The real reason is Greenpeace! They came out with a report on how environment friendly consumer electronics manufacturers actually are. And guess what? Apple is close to the last!

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.

Re:Bogus

[grev]

Additionally, they make no evidence or justification on how they establish their weightings of their criteria to determine ranking.

*Additionally, it's bullshit.

Re:Bogus

[Hercules Peanut]

Conversely..

Let's say you release Gatorade into a river. By the time the effects become painfully obvious it'll be already too late: you'll have put innocent workers through hell, bankrupt business and damaged the economy. it'll have had a great effect on the economy of the area...
So I understand the idea of let's know what we are talking about before we jump to conclusions either way.

Seems to me we should have some analysis done before dumping anything into a river. After that, we can make an intelligent decision.

Righteous

[Doc Ruby]

"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.

Re:Bogus

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems to me we should have some analysis done before dumping anything into a river. After that, we can make an intelligent decision.

Who the hell is going to pay for that? Cheaper to just dump your shit, hope you don't get caught, and when you do scream and cry and wave your hands and do everything you can to discredit the "greenies" and claim it wasn't your fault and it's not really a problem, then go out of business and leave taxpayers holding the bag while you retire on your golden parachute, leaving just $100 in the corporate coffers to split between cleanup and your ex-employees last paycheck. How many superfund sites are out there that went exactly like this?

It's funny though, companies are starting to discover that for certain things (like the amount of overpackaging we end up using in America), going "the green way" is cheaper than the way they were doing it, but they'll dress it up as "oh wow we're like totally environmentally conscious, dude!" instead of "hey look, we're saving money".

Re:More information from a non-/.ed site...

[JulesLt]

I suspect there is an element of publicity here - targeting Apple makes more headlines than, say, Lenovo. On the other hand, Apple have traded for a long time on a cuddly 'computer for hippies' image - even if they've never actually been explicit about it, there's the implicit idea that Apple should somehow be more right-on than other computer firms.

Negative publicity also seems to be about the only way to achieve corporate accountability these days, given that governments everywhere have rescinded responsibility to 'market forces' - and market forces are rarely about facts. It does seem that the campaigns where Greenpeace has been less than scientifically accurate (Brent Spar being another case) attract more attention than the ones that are (perhaps because it's easier for people to get angry at a corporation for pollution, than change their own behaviour).

The downside of this is that it continues the slide that there are 'two sides to every story', 'scientists can prove anything they want', etc.

Re:Bogus

[dawnzer]

I don't think the Gatorade example is that bad. Even "completely normal things" can be pretty harmful dumped into a river. I remember in my college wastewater class, we used milk as an example of a seemingly harmless substance causing pollution. If a milk tanker had an accident and all the milk leaked into a nearby stream, it could totally screw up the ecosystem and kill a lot of fish.

It would basically cause the number of bacteria in the water to spike which would lower the oxegen level in the water. I would think the sugar in Gatorade would do the same.

Re:Bogus

[vadim_t]

Ahh, I get it now. But still there's a vast difference in scale.

Given any chemical, chances are there are organisms that need it to live, and others find it poisonous. Plenty examples around: Some organisms can't stand oxygen, some bacteria live in acidic environments and volcanic vents, dogs find chocolate poisonous...

But IMO, there's a bit difference between say, milk and DDT. While I bet fish don't like milk to much, there's a big difference between that and DDT which can affect whole ecosystems by accumulating, and getting increasingly concentrated up the food chain.

Re:Bogus

[d0n quix0te]

Remember, the stakeholders in the environmental issues are not just citizens and corporations. Stakeholders include our children and children's children, and other living beings on the planet. Hence the need to err on the side of caution. Using simple minded economics to lump all of these into externality costs are quite dangerous.

Re:Bogus

[Zoop]

Conversely, you'll never know the benefits you've forsaken on the off chance that all the standard tests for safety are wrong. The Precautionary Principle is the environmental equivalent of the legal principle that advises a company who sells baseballs to never come out with a baseball that will harm fewer people because they might get sued for their previous, less-safe balls. In other words, to prevent one type of possible and unlikely harm, you're forgoing probable benefits.

The Precautionary Principle is also logically fallacious, because it is impossible to prove a negative. Prove you aren't an alien life form. Go on, prove it. I can create objections to each and every argument you give based on untested (and untestable) possibilities.

Furthermore, it is a blind alley for environmental activism. There are many known hazardous substances with less-harmful alternatives in wide use today. Preemptively banning new AIDS drugs to prevent another Thalidomide will only distract from real health and ecological improvements.

Is there a point that I'm missing?

[beaverfever]

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?

Re:Nothing ulterior that I see

[paeanblack]

We've got some new packagings for the new Nano as well. And it's 52% less volume.

Isn't the new Nano about 52% smaller anyways? Wouldn't you naturally expect less packaging?

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