I understand it -- and do think that the decision is rational -- from a business perspective, but at the end of the day it's Apple making a conscious choice to make their products less environmentally friendly. That's completely fine for Apple to do, but its still disappointing that they're disregarding environmental standards.
More disconcertingly, one can see the comments here -- largely defending Apple and marginalizing the issue -- being completely different if it was, say, Microsoft.
That's just not true. They are saying that they will no longer comply with an out-dated standard. Their current practices in manufacturing, materials and offering recycling of their own products are superior to the EPEAT guidelines. They actual already go above and beyond the EPEAT guidelines and now they won't be beholden in their designs to those guidelines.
Just take a look at this article and check out the links to see for yourself how Apple was already doing more than the EPEAT guidelines required.
And as an aside - Microsoft in comparison is not a hardware company and the comments here aren't marginalizing the issue. The articles and reporting have blown this out of proportion to begin with.
That sounds like a smokescreen. Sure, Apple does a lot of good environmental stuff that's not covered by EPEAT. But that doesn't change that it's started gluing screens and batteries to cases, making them basically impossible to recycle, which is the real story here.
I don't know. Why are computers needed to be recycled by HAND? C'mon, cars are recycled by machinery and modern cars use glue like hell. So whats the issue here?
Permanently affixing readily recyclable components like memory and batteries to system boards are not "superior" practices by any meaningful measure. They are practices that enhance the marketing segmentation of their products and make Apple more money -- while making recovery of valuable assets (memory, battery materials) impossible at the end of the device's lifecycle.
Offering recycling of products is meaningless -- relatively few devices get recycled by the manufacturers programs (particularly at institutional customers like schools or enterprises).
«Recycling is NOT dumping it in a landfill, burning it OR bringing it to a recycling center. It is about removing materials requiring special handling and separating a product into distinct materials so those materials can be re-used.
For metal, this is easy. You can simply take a complete car, grind it up, melt and scoop all the bits non-metal. You have fully recycled the metal... but still, burning all that plastic, battery acid, glass is a bit nasty.
You COULD use a magnet to separate the metal from the rest but not all metals are magnetic and this will STILL leave you with a mess of non-metal that would take a legion to sort by hand.
So, how do you REALLY recycle a car? You take it apart. You remove the plastic bumper and put it on the pile with other plastic parts that you know are the same type of plastic because it is stamped on the part. Same types of plastics can be for better recycled then a pile of all sorts combined. This goes so far that for instance plastic bottles can be shredded and just melted into new ones. Failed bottles at production go right back into the process.
Once you separated all the different materials, you can re-use them or dispose of them in a safe manner. But the separation must be relatively easy OR the costs just sky-rocket. Taking of a bumper is easy especially if you don't have to care about damage. Separating two bonded plates, not so much.
A prime example of this is in electricity cables. Copper is expensive enough to make recycling worth while but separating it from the plastic surrounding it, is near impossible. What is done instead in many places is that the plastic is burned off. A very polluting process and not the idea behind recycling at all.
Now Apples devices are hard to take apart. If a screen can't be screwed open, the screen can't be separated from the shell, meaning it has to be shredded instead. You can still reclaim some materials but not as easily as with a screw driver.
The above poster seems to think that recycling means re-using working parts or re-selling the entire device. This is a FORM of recycling but NOT what this article is about. In the end, after re-selling the device will either end up in a landfill, be dumped OR be taken apart. The first two are wasteful, the second becomes more costly when the separate materials are harder to separate. Apple has basically said, we don't give a fuck about the environment and try to hide it by saying they are better but in areas nobody measures. Well, I am a better sportsman then anyone at the Olympics, just not in any Olympic sport.»
More disconcertingly, one can see the comments here -- largely defending Apple and marginalizing the issue -- being completely different if it was, say, Microsoft.