Apple Environmentally Friendly?

I am a mac... no wait, I am a PC... hold on,... I am a mac, on a PC, with Vista inside the mac! Yes. I am an OS-X-Vista mac-tel.

More importantly, while I am friendly to mac, is Apple friendly with the environment? Well, according to the EPA, on 23 mandatory and other optional criteria, Apple Computers is in the top 5 companies for EPA environmental friendliness. Cool huh? I think this can be explained by the fact that they have been working with Al Gore to tighten up that score. Way to go Steve and Al! You did it!

Hold on. I believe in equal time. A while back I wrote a blog entry about "green washing" which basically means performing a few tricks to qualify as green, but once under the microscope maybe it ends up only being a green hue as opposed to green through-and-through. Is Apple one of these companies? Well, Al Gore didn't just work with Apple to advize them, he became a board member. And what does that mean? Well, I have no idea, but I am guessing that their might be a small connection between Apple - Al Gore - EPA. At the minimum, Al likely showed them how to qualify as "EPA Green." Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. I encourage it. What do other "green" groups think of it? Well... a well known group called "Green Peace" also makes a list of who is naughty and who is nice, when it comes to being Green. And to be fair they measure everything from recycling to work conditions for employees in factories around the world associated with the computer creation process. On their list, compairing a large list of companies, Apple is DEAD LAST! What? That's right. The EPA says "silver star" Apple... you are green! While at the same time Green Peace says, "Rotten Apple!"

Personally, I find that completely confusing. How does EPA say they are near the top of green with Green Peace claim that they are the absolute worst (not poor or sadly in the middle... the worst!)? I don't know, but I will venture a small guess in the style of the boardgame clue... Al Gore, with an Apple, greenwashing in the bathroom!? On a more serious note, it would be nice to hear more from Apple about their Green Peace score and how or if they intended to deal with some of their recycling and 3rd world production issues.

As a side note: It wasn't too long ago, in the world of the web, that one of the largest opponents of Adobe Flash (then, Macromedia Flash) technology was explaining to the world about how non-user-friendly and clumsy Flash technology was. As a result, and a short while later, Adobe hired that same critique to sit with the designers of Flash and architect a more acceptable future. A version or so later, the world fell in love with Flash and the still-independant opponent of Flash became not a proponent, but rather a friend to the company. In a similar thread, inviting Al Gore onto the bench at Apple is like hiring the hottest baseball player to come play ball for you. Does it ensure that you are a better team? Not necessarily. But one thing is true, they did suddenly score very high on the EPA ranking system. A Silver medal is nothing to bawlk at. The fact is that under Al Gore, Apple created a friendly competition for competativeness to get high scores, but surprisingly Dell and HP received the "Gold" not silver like Al Gore's Apple. Well, that doesn't mean Apple is the worst, but it does reduce all of the buzz to, well, buzz at best. I say that because Dell and HP together had over 200 pieces of hardware under EPA EPEAT review and are both in the top 20 PC manufacturers, as compaired to Apple's 21 pieces of equipment under review. Needless to say, it seems that if you respect Green Peace and the EPA, the real winners are Fuzitsu and HP... if going green is your priority.