14 DAY TRIAL // A total of 36 Chinese environmental groups are accusing Apple of being too evasive when it comes to disclosing the measures it takes to reduce its carbon footprint in factories supplying the components for its products.
The groups published a report this week, putting Apple at the bottom of a list of 29 multinational companies inquired on the measures each company took to deal with pollution and health hazard incidents at factories that supply their hardware.
According to the Chinese environmentalist groups, Apple has failed to provide the necessary information to quantify its carbon footprint spanning a year’s worth of inquiries from said organizations, the Financial Times reports.
Apple was also inquired on the reported poisoning of 49 workers at Lianjian Technology, a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Wintek, which produces touchscreen panels for Apple’s iOS-based products, on which the company, again, failed to provide a straight answer.
Companies like HP, BT, Alcatel-Lucent, Vodafone, Samsung, Toshiba, Sharp and Hitachi are touted as positive examples, as they responded such inquiries while taking visible steps to adjust their practices.
Apple was named among companies like Nokia, LG, SingTel, Sony and Ericsson as being unresponsive.
The Mac maker is said to have refused to confirm or deny whether the polluting companies were their suppliers.
“Apple behaved differently from the other big brands and seemed totally complacent and unresponsive,” said to Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, the main author of the report in question.
Pressed to comment on the matter, Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said the company had a rigorous auditing program that investigated its suppliers and other parts of the business supply chain.
Dowling pointed the inquirers to the company’s own environmental materials published online.
Softpedia note Apple has clarified in the past that it doesn’t want to impress groups like Greenpeace, as it is confident that the materials it publishes on its web site are sufficient to draw a line.
Unlike other electronics vendors, Apple can also brag about reducing the customer's carbon footprint, by limiting the power consumption in its products (image above).
This may be one of the reasons why the Cupertino giant does not want to be involved in studies that pose standard inquiries which may, or may not focus on the environmental efforts that are transferred over to the customer.