OK, here’s the download – I mean, the low-down – about Apple, the iPhone and Greenpeace.
Folks from Greenpeace must have camped out like legions of Apple-lovers and obtained one of the first iPhones when they went on sale in June. In an article today, "Missed call: the iPhone’s hazardous chemicals – When will promises of a greener Apple bear fruit?," Greenpeace states that a Greenpeace lab in the U.K. tore apart an iPhone and found it contained plenty of brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and polyvinyl chloride PVC, the kind of nasty stuff that would warm your landfill and make it glow for eons.
Not very nice, Apple.
"[Apple CEO] Steve Jobs has missed the call on making the iPhone his first step towards greening Apple’s products," the Greenpeace article quotes its Zeina Alhajj, Greenpeace International’s toxics campaigner as opining. "It seems that Apple is far from leading the way for a green electronics industry as competitors, like Nokia, already sell mobile phones free of PVC."
And, Greenpeace rightly calls out the press for focusing on the iPhone’s glitz and writing little of substance about the nongreen nature of the iPhone’s innards.
But, Greenpeace seems particularly upset that when Apple unveiled the iPhone in June, the company said little or nothing about the mobile phone’s environmental impact.
I applaud Greenpeace for applying considerable pressure on Apple over the last year to clean-up its component mix, which appears to lag the greener designs of some of its competitors’ products.
However, in May, Greenpeace applauded Apple’s "A Greener Apple" announcement that the company would do its best to eliminate toxic substances from its new products.
In fact, Apple pledged to eliminate arsenic, PVC and BFRs in all of its products by the end of 2008.
So, what changed between May, when Greenpeace applauded Apple for its new direction, and today, when Greenpeace zinged Apple for the toxic design of the iPhone?
Well, Greenpeace deftly researched the iPhone’s chemistry, but to my knowledge Apple has not reneged on its pledge to make its products PVC- and BFRs-free by the end of next year.
So, to mangle a popular iPod download, all we are saying, is give Apple a chance.
With the iPhone’s introduction looming a few weeks after Apple’s May pledge to get greener, I guess Jobs could have decided at that late date to delay the introduction of the iPhone for a year or more until Apple could figure out how to make the phone greener. But how likely was Apple to go along with a blown deadline like that?
Meanwhile, let’s tear apart some Macs, iPods and iPhones on Jan. 1, 2009, and if the toxins aren’t gone, let’s recycle all of those iPhones, at the least, and buy Nokias.