How Steve Jobs Got Green Overnight 194
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."
Mirror? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Probably fud anyway, but hey - I like to read rumor mongering too.
Re:Mirror? (Score:5, Informative)
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Bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, they make no evidence or justification on how they establish their weightings of their criteria to determine ranking.
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Insightful)
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]
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Are my 2500 CDs and the next 2500 digital versions more or less poluting than an iPod? I don't own one, but have the music on my laptop. How much comparative elect
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Say, batteries can be made with mercury (very poisonous), nickel-cadmium (also harmful) or nickel-metal hydride (less bad than NiCD). While I imagine that NiMH isn't something you'd want to have in your water either, AFAIK, it's a lot better. Besides, the capacity it has is much better than NiCD, which would mean a further decrease in pollution (you need less NiMH batteries than NiCD for the same capacity).
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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 intelli
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Interesting)
Kelsey (the FDA scientist that evaluated thalidomide) had an amazing luck: She was given something that was actually very harmful. She was pressured by both the company and her superiors to just approve it, but she didn't give in. She became a hero when the truth was known.
However, if it turned out to have been actually harmless, she'd have very possibly been demoted instead. Very few people would have seen it as a job well done in that case.
That's the problem really, being careful is a very, very good thing as the case of thalidomide shows. But people only understand that when they see an example in action. Had it been harmless, she'd have been seen as annoying and stubborn instead, if she remained with the FDA chances are further objections from her would be ignored, and perhaps something even worse would have been approved without oversight.
The gatorade example is bad, anyway. Gatorade, AFAIK, doesn't contain anything very strange, and an isotonic solution is made of completely normal things (water, salt, sugar, orange juice or banana IIRC). Now if you've got some new ingredient that was made in a lab, I'd rather wait than risk being poisoned.
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It would basically cause the number of bacteria in the water to spike which would lower the oxegen level in the water.
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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 accum
Re:Bogus (Score:5, Funny)
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This is a bit disengenous, as thalidomide has specific effects (primarily by blocking angiogenesis) and is quite useful in individuals who have leprosy and won't be undergoing angiogenesis (that is, they are adults.) In other words, unle
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Actually, I know, and I have pointed that out in one of my posts.
What I meant to say is that she was lucky it had harmful effects. Had it happened to be harmless, the perception of wha
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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 jus
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- bottom line
or
- regulatory compliance
Organic food companies make organic food not because they believe in environmental responsibility, but because it's a great way to carve a niche in an otherwise saturated market. Similarly, companies phase out toxic chemicals not because they are trying to protect the environment, but because it either saves money, reduces potential liability, or ensures compliance with the law. Apple recyc
Re:Bogus (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Let me continue that train of thought. Why not remove all safety controls? If you can't prove something is 100% safe, why bother? Think about the great things we could have if we didn't have to do things like testing whether food is poisonous, or whether cosmetics will give you skin cancer, or make sure that a car doesn't fall to pieces on the road or blow up in a collision.
We could have such wonderful thing
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There must be a better way than going back to stone
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Nobody is talking about making everything 100% safe. Nothing is. The thing is achieving a balance, where reasonable precautions are taken to ensure some rather vital things, lik
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*Additionally, it's bullshit.
Righteous (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If they actually DID that I'd agree with you. Unfortunately, all too often they take a hard-line, head-in-the-sand approach and insist that there be NO risk whatsoever. That NO amount of polution or radiation or environmental impact is acceptable.
And that leads to no progress whatsoever.
Someone wants to build a wave-power generation system off the coast. "Oh no," they say. "We don't know the effects of doing
Re:Righteous (Score:5, Interesting)
So there's yet another layer being conflated into bashing Greenpeace. There's evidence, risk, and harm. Their policy says evidence of risk, even without evidence of harm, means we shouldn't use the risky chemicals. Which sounds like a completely sensible policy, that we all use in our own lives. But if Greenpeace acts outside that policy, against chemicals (or, by extension, other products) without even evidence of risk, then there's a different argument, about whether Greenpeace even follows its own policy.
FWIW, "head in the sand" describes people who ignore risk as well as people who fear it despite evidence its harm is negligible. And our litigious/risk-averse society is commensurately full of irresponsible harm and ignored risks. Mostly to the benefit of chemical corps which risk and harm us with impunity. The unnecessary lawsuits are mostly exploiting oversimplification of even basic complexities like evidence/risk/harm evaluation. And the risk aversion is much more characteristic of corporations than of humans, as you can tell from the balance of lawsuits.
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Meanwhile, your obfuscation underscores the entire point I made about the actual evidence of risk and its evaluation.
You're trying to argue that we should ignore proven risks until the full extent of their damage is proven, even when that is impossible,
Your inability to consider independently risks and their damage is typical of people who are afraid to swim.
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Now you're just lying to cover up your failed trick.
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The only reason to reply to that ridiculous troll is to point out that people who say "asshat" usually think that they can run away from saying unfunny things that blow up in their face by calling it a "joke". Just because people are lauging at you, Anonymous Coward, doesn't mean you're joking. It means you're a joke.
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Where did he/she even say they were an American?
Hypocrisy thy name is Sj0
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You're still failing to distinguish between the probability that something bad can happen, and how bad it will be if it does happen. That's the distinction made in that Greenpeace policy. Which says that when knowing how bad it will be is impossible, that we should still stop using chemicals that are proven to pose substantial risk.
Aren't you just engaging in rampant conflation and grandstanding by ignoring that distinction and its prudence?
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Where is Greenpeace lionizing large companies with good PR departments (assumedly with dirty products)?
And how do
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even if the full extent of harm has not yet been fully established scientifically. 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.
I don't see anything invalid there! If you lived downstream from a factory and got your water from that stream, would you feel comforted by a statement like "None of the novel chemicals we dump in the stream have ever been conclusively proven to be harmful"? How about if you found out half of them
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Already Slashdotted (Score:2)
Slashdotted in record time (Score:4, Funny)
Slashdotted on the weekend? (Score:4, Informative)
The greenpeace link [greenpeace.org]
Rebuttal (Score:5, Informative)
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Real greens would dump the consumerist iPod (Score:5, Funny)
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Fair enough, but I suspect you aren't using the new recycled twigs and recycled mulched hiippies?
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But can it run Rockbox?
Apple should migrate to a new system (Score:4, Interesting)
This does go against their direct shipping to the customer from the factory system they currently operate.
However the small packaging for the nano is a good first step. Also the turnover on Apple computer hardware tends to be less than PC hardware - people will keep an Apple running for a year or two more than a PC in general. Of course there will those of us running 12 year old SparcStations as print servers and old P200s as routers, but generally people replace PCs when the old one gets slow for whatever reason. Lower turnover means less hardware being recycled overall.
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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.
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More information from a non-/.ed site... (Score:5, Informative)
Since the article site is so clearly slashdotted, here's a related article from MacObserver.com entitled Greenpeace Hazardous Material Report Slams Apple [macobserver.com].
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Re:More information from a non-/.ed site... (Score:5, Interesting)
To me, Greenpeace seems about as trustworthy as PETA at the moment.
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Negative publicity also seems to be about the only way to achieve corporate accountability these days, given that governments everywhere have rescinded responsi
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That's a given.
What I'm curious about is why so many people put so much trust in Apple, HP and Dell to be environmentally friendly. And why Greenpeace is focusing on laptops instead of other much more serious environmental concerns, such as transportation, power, etc.
I think its been proven notebooks do not cause global warming.
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They heat up my pants, which contain my world...
Thats pretty close to the same as global warming isn't it?
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It's science. You can't argue with that.
Campaign on the Greenpeace site (Score:2)
Aha... (Score:5, Funny)
2. As evidence, cite a link that is already down -- people will assume it's slashdotted.
3. People don't know what you're claiming, but a negative cloud surrounds their image of Apple.
4. Next time, they'll buy a Zune! Yeah! (aka: profit)
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Oh, I believed it was slashdotted (though it happened a lot quicker than usual)... but even slashdot summaries usually have more content than "But it turns out that there is SOMETHING SCARY going on! Click on the link!" with no hint at what the link contains. I mean, it's the only link in the whole summary, I think it's reasonable to expect some idea of what the story is about rather than this teaser nonsense...
Of course, other posters have now given mirrors, etc., as well as some pretty solid critiques s
Re:Aha... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Unfortunatley Greepeace, like PETA, is borderline "terrorist" group in its tactics and unilaterialism. I'm for all being nice to animals, drinking clean water, and breathing clean air and forcing corporations to comply, but some of their hostile actions really turn off moderates and centrists.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpeace#Criticism_ [wikipedia.org]
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Weeks old FUD (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Home/E83D58B3-10
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against certain pollution of poisonous flame retardands. Are the unlucky owners
of laptops with exploding sony batteries glad that they didn't die when the
house burned down or concerned that the fumes they inhaled could make them ill.
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Traces of a NON REGULATED fire retardant CONSIDERED SAFE by the WHO (and the EU and the EPA) is all Greenpeace could find in the Mac Book Pro, so they spun a tale about how this TBBPA was a toxic chemical (is isn't) that is potentially killing babies (it isn't) when in reality, it saves lives by retarding plastics from burning and allowing an extra chance for babies to
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Smug Alert! (Score:2, Funny)
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Apple's trump on environment (Score:2)
Stop buying ipods if you want to be green (Score:2)
If you really want to be green, just kee
Nothing ulterior that I see (Score:2, Insightful)
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
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That Greenpeace study didn't look at how environmentally friendly products are. Mostly they looked at what promises "(commitments)" companies made for the future. Apple is known to be very bad at making promises and excellent at delivering, so that didn't go down well with Greenpeace. Making promises is cheap. Maybe Greenpeace makes a follow-up study in three years where they measure percentage of promises actually delivered. Then Apple
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Isn't the new Nano about 52% smaller anyways? Wouldn't you naturally expect less packaging?
This is news??? (Score:2)
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Does anyone seriously believe... (Score:2)
Re:Does anyone seriously believe... (Score:4, Informative)
Statistics from Wikipedia: $360 million revenue, 1800 employees, estimated 2.8M supporters.
Whatever you think about Greenpeace, the fact is that they're far from being insignificant.
New package probably worse. (Score:2)
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It's #7, non-recyclable.
Steve Jobs == Enviro-conscous (Score:2)
My close friend and Greenpeace founder will have nothing to do with what becom
Trans Fat in Apple Newtons (Score:2, Funny)
I say BS (Score:3, Informative)
About the the inconsistencies and outright lies in Greenpeace' report read this [roughlydrafted.com], this [roughlydrafted.com] and this [roughlydrafted.com].
Steve Jobs and environmental issues (Score:5, Interesting)
Then Jobs returned to Apple, and suddenly everything had to be in glossy boxes, so it looked cool.
So yeah, I believe that Apple under Jobs has a bad environmental record.
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Likewise, the least of my concerns when it come to computers is the packaging and shipping. A bigger concern is that a computer dirty item to make. Therefore it should be a somewhat durable good, and last for 3-5 years. Many computers meet this requirement, either through allowing upgrade
Do the Editors Read the Site? (Score:2, Informative)
Now, several weeks later, an article is posted referencing some guy's blog who has just now discovered the Gree
Not overnight (Score:2)
Including the discovery of the "oh so new" page for Environment. Strange that I used to visit that page back then
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.apple.com
2004 huh? Yep, I'd say it's overnight.
Psychotic Rant (Score:2, Offtopic)
Let me just say that most people aren't really serious about being "green." If they were, they'd just STOP being consumer whores altogether. However, being green is en vogue and cool. Why? Because all of the efforts and publicity stunts done by Greenpeace and their compadres are nothing more than fertilizer for the
Obvious joke (now that I've had a beer) (Score:2)
Is there a point that I'm missing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Recycling (Score:2)
Greener than Gore (Score:2, Offtopic)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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The battery issue is the primary reason that I will not buy an iPod. Like you, I'm somewhat disgusted by the fact that the product is expected to end up in a landfill (battery and all) in a relatively s
Huh? (Score:2)
Greenpeace issued a report ranking manufacturers according to how "green" they are. In response, one of the companies decided to change their packaging to increase their rank.
That is the whole point of such rankings and Greenpeace PR campaigns. It looks like it worked. Good for them.
greenpeace is always right! (Score:2)
Numbers lie (Score:2, Informative)
1.) The Nano packaging is quite small as it is. Volume is not the major factor when calculating the fossil fuel required to ship these things from the asian sweatshops to the apple stores around the world. Weight is the key factor.
2.) The heaviest part of a nano package is the nano itself. I don't own a nano, bu
Apple recycled (Score:2)
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Smaller packaging = more units per shipping crate = fewer shipping crates needed = fewer shipping fees.
Profit!