Feed Subscriptions
Rolling Links
greenpeace is at it again, after successfully bullying apple for its environmental carelessness by ranking it as the worst PC manufacturer in terms of environmental impact (march ‘07) and motivating job’s new recycling program, a new greenpeace study reveals the presence of (banned) brominated fire retardants in the iphone - which is leading the state of california to threaten a lawsuit for use of banned (carcinogenic) substances.
but who cares about brominated fire retardants (which are prominent is all consumer electronics)? apple does much worse for the environment because it sells products that are made for disposal, with no user-replaceable parts! the key to environmentally sustainable design is long product life which implies that users have the ability to repair, replace and upgrade products to extend their useful lives. the lack of removable battery in the ipods and iphones 1)encourages early disposal of the entire device and 2)requires excessive shipping in order to ever replace the battery. you could argue that sending it back to apple assures that the old battery would be ‘recycled‘ but how often does this really happen? and why? according to the ipod deathclock, a video ipod used 10 hours a week while jogging (and twice dropped) has a total lifespan of about two years:
in case you do want to preserve your purchase, be aware that shipping an entire ipod to california and back (from boston) just for battery replacement generates 2.8kg of CO2 by air and 0.6 kg of CO2 by land, about ten times more than just shipping batteries the same distance. but how can we estimate the environmental impact of devices that discourage maintenance? if a consumer is discouraged from replacing a battery and decides to buy a new device instead, the environmental damage is compounded and within two or three development cycles an ipod user can generate double the environmental impact of anyone else. unfortunately, apple’s lead is encouraging other manufacturers to omit removable batteries from their products, so that the net effect is multiplying rather than decreasing.
