Apple lays out carbon footprint data

26 September 2009:

This week, Apple overhauled the environmental section of its website with more data about its efforts, most prominently featuring an extensive breakdown of the company’s annual corporate carbon emissions.

Apple has taken flak in this department for trailing behind the likes of Dell and HP, both of which publish their annual carbon emissions, to the tune of 471,000 tons and 8.4 million tons respectively. Apple, on the other hand, calculates it generates 10.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions in a year.

Although Dell and HP’s numbers might sound significantly more environmentally friendly, it turns out that they’re limited in what they actually measure. For example, those companies’ figures don’t take into account the impact their products have on the environment during their lifetime. Apple, on the other hand, has explicitly broken down exactly where those 10.2 million tons come from: 38 percent from manufacturing, 5 percent during transportation, 53 percent from product use, 1 percent from recycling, and 3 percent from its own facilities.