Is Greenpeace Off the Mark on Apple?

The group says Apple isn't ridding its products of nasty chemicals fast enough. But it may be holding the company to different standards

by Arik Hesseldahl

I live in New York City, but I was born in Oregon, and Oregonians are no strangers to environmental controversies. During my college years the state was inflamed by a debate over how to protect the Northern spotted owl, a peculiar little bird with so strong a penchant for nesting in large trees in "old growth" forests that it found itself unable to flourish in younger forests.

Environmentalists rallied around the bird to reduce the amount of logging on federally administered forests, and when the U.S. government decided to add the owl to the list of threatened species, logging in the Northwest slowed way down. Many jobs were lost and small, independent logging outfits shuttered.

Gore Play

Both sides of the debate cast their versions of the matter in apocalyptic terms, each ignoring key facts and injecting lots of needless drama to get their points across. The owl was already under pressure from predators and other owls, and despite habitat protection, its numbers continued to dwindle. Loggers, who argued that scores of thousands of jobs would be lost, ignored the fact that the logging industry in the region had been in decline for decades.

I lived in an area directly affected by the loss of logging jobs, and my father worked for the U.S. Forest Service. My proximity to the spotted owl spat can't help but color my impression of the green controversy now surrounding Apple (AAPL).

Greenpeace is bringing the rhetorical hammer down on Apple for what it considers environmental offenses, namely for not moving fast enough to eliminate nasty chemicals from its products. Its latest headline-grabbing maneuver: pressure on ex-Vice-President and current Apple director Al Gore—he of last year's PowerPoint presentation turned Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. Publicly pressuring Gore, the thinking goes, improves the chances that Apple's board will amply consider two eco-friendly shareholder proposals.

Those proposals, as described in a Mar. 21 letter sent to Gore by Greenpeace and 73 other organizations, sound reasonable enough. Sponsored by As You Sow, a shareholder activism group, and Trillium Asset Management, a socially responsible investment firm, the proposals call on Apple to do two things: one, bolster efforts to help customers recycle old computers and other electronic equipment by adding take-back centers in Apple stores, for instance; and two, study the feasibility of setting a timetable on eliminating polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and brominated flame retardant (BFR) from its products (see BusinessWeek.com, 3/12/07, "Hugging The Tree Huggers"). The letter also says all board members, Gore included, are on the record as opposing the proposals.

Somewhat Bizarre

This is just the latest effort by Greenpeace to shame Apple into taking what it considers corrective action on environmental practices. In that same report, marked by a squishy scoring system that rated some things as "partially bad" and others as "partially good" computer maker Dell (DELL) scored much higher, alongside Nokia (NOK), the world's no. 1 wireless handset maker.

Apple makes for a convenient target, given its splashy, event-based marketing efforts, slick TV ads, big profits, and brand cachet among young, affluent consumers who tend to identify themselves with left-leaning causes like environmentalism. And let's face it, Steve Jobs, the vegetarian with a penchant for generous donations to Democratic politicians, doesn't discourage the connection. Apple ads have featured such liberal icons as John Lennon, Cesar Chavez, and Jane Goodall. Grabbing a Democratic greenie like Gore as a director on the heels of his work as a special consultant for Google (GOOG) was a no-brainer.