Apple Is Greener Than Greenpeace Says

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Rewriting the Rules

Well, if the rules of the game can change at Greenpeace's will, then here's a change that should make sense: weighted scoring. Dell and Apple aren't in quite the same league. Dell sold 40 million PCs in 2007 while Apple sold 7 million. Dell sells more PCs in a quarter than Apple sells all year. If Dell were to eliminate PVC and BFRs entirely, its positive impact would be demonstrably larger than Apple's.

Weighted scoring would make reaching a positive score a little harder for larger vendors. At the same time, they would reap greater scoring rewards for positive actions, and be penalized a little more for a negative action. Dell suffered almost no penalty for backing away from its previously stated time line on eliminating toxic materials, while Apple gained little to no benefit from sticking to, and exceeding, its goals. Weighted scoring would fix this discrepancy.

Dell also beats Apple in the "precautionary principle" category, which basically says that companies should err on the side of caution in using chemicals that may be harmful to human health. If it comes to a choice between eliminating a chemical and keeping it, even if the scientific jury is still out on the health consequences, the company should opt to eliminate the chemical. It's a fine idea, and one that most people could reasonably endorse.

But it's not clear why Dell achieves a top score, while Apple doesn't. Apple scores a zero for making no mention of "the precautionary principle" in its environmental statements, while Dell scores three points for employing the phrase. Greenpeace says Apple "seems to be guided by this principle of environmental policy." But simply not using the right words results in a zero score. How maddeningly illogical!

Carbon Emissions and Energy Efficiency

The whole issue of carbon footprint and energy use is also a muddy one. Dell made a lot of noise about energy use in 2007 when it announced plans to be carbon neutral by the end of 2008 (BusinessWeek.com, 9/27/07). And it continues to disclose its overall carbon footprint, which wins it better scores, not only on the Greenpeace report, but also from organizations like Climate Counts and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Rather than reporting on the net measurement of its emissions, Apple instead chooses to report its carbon footprint on a per-product and a per-employee basis. Apple argues that 95% of its carbon emissions are the result of manufacturing, transportation, use, and recycling over the life cycle of the product, and only 5% from Apple facilities itself. Apple likes to point to reductions in packaging material that allow more products to be shipped at once, thus increasing energy efficiency in the transportation process.

This fact is essentially ignored by Greenpeace. Yet Apple beats Dell handily on the issue of energy-efficient products, exceeding Energy Star 4.0 standards in all product lines while half of Dell's notebooks and two-thirds of its desktop systems meet or exceed Energy Star standards. The net result, given Dell's sales volume, is that Dell's machines are responsible for more carbon reaching the atmosphere than are Apple's, at least while they're in use. Here, too, I think weighted scoring based on net impact would paint a more accurate picture of which company has the greener approach.

Given the public ribbing that Apple has taken from Greenpeace over the years, I think the computer maker is a little resistant to jump through all of the group's ever-evolving hoops. It could probably outscore Dell overall if Greenpeace were to make its methodology more reflective of each company's true impact. That Apple continues to fall short says less about Apple's standing as an environmentally friendly company than it does about the company's willingness to play by all of Greenpeace's occasionally inconsistent and illogical rules. Having made so many changes on the environmental front in the last year alone, from cleaner products to wider disclosure than ever before, Apple is getting very little credit—too little, in my book.

Business Exchange related topics:
Apple
Green Computing
Green Energy
Dell

Hesseldahl is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.