Macopinion

Is Apple Greenpeace’s Whitecoat Seal Of Consumer Electronics?

Bear with me for a moment for a bit of introductory preamble. This does have something to do with Apple and the Macintosh. I live in Atlantic Canada, home to, among other things, the annual Canadian east coast seal hunt, which I imagine most people reading this will have heard of. Heck, Steve Wozniak is even here this week. Unfortunately, what you have heard about the seal hunt may well have been mainly - how shall I put this? - a pack of lies and misrepresentations, at least if it’s based on the typical propaganda and disinformation disseminated by various animal rights organizations and their fellow-travelers.

For example, if you visit the anti-sealing Websites or read the fundraising literature of these groups, you could be forgiven for imagining that the seal hunters target whitecoat baby seals.

Buzzzzzzz! Wrong! The fact is that Canada banned the harvest of whitecoat seals back in 1987.

Or you might be laboring under the misconception that the non-whitecoat seals legally harvested are generally clubbed to death.

Buzzzzz! Wrong again! While clubs are still used occasionally, more than ninety percent of animals taken these days are shot with rifles. A report published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal titled “Animal welfare and the harp seal hunt in Atlantic Canada,” (Can Vet J 2002;43:687–694) found that “The large majority of seals taken during this hunt - at best, 98 per cent in work reported here - are killed in an acceptably humane manner.”

Maybe you have are under the impression that the seal population off Canada’s east coast is “endangered,” or even threatened with extinction.

Buzzzzz! Couldn’t be more wrong. It is bizarrely misleading to suggest that opposition to seal hunting is a “conservation issue,” when Atlantic Canadian seals are the quintessence of a renewable resource - their population not only thriving, but exploding, now approximately three times what it was in the 1970s and constituting a serious threat to the survival of several fish species that really are threatened with extinction. Last winter Canada’s federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn noted that “Canada’s harp seal herd is a conservation success story..... The herd right now is at its highest peak ever in history.” Dalhousie University professor Ransom Myers, who has produced more than 125 peer-reviewed papers on marine science has commented: “This isn’t really a conservation issue ...This is an animal-rights issue.” The anti-sealing crowd should at least be honest about their real agenda. If killing seals is inherently “cruel,” than so is killing beef steers or chickens, or for that matter, haddock.

People of course have every right to protest the killing of animals, whether it be on an ice floe or in a slaughterhouse, if that is their persuasion, but to single out seal hunting for protest while continuing to eat beef, pork, or fowl, and wearing leather shoes and accessories is disingenuously inconsistent to say the least.

However animal rights groups discovered long ago that cute baby seals are wonderfully efficient levers for prying cash from the pockets of ill-informed sentimentalists, and don’t hesitate to shamelessly exploit old images of baby whitecoats, which I repeat haven’t been hunted for two decades, in their solicitations and propaganda.

According to the not-for-profit International Wildlife Management Consortium (IWMC) World Conservation Trust, a Lausanne, Switzerland-based organization that promotes Sustainable Use as a conservation mechanism, the protection of the sovereign rights of independent nations, and the respect of diverse cultures and traditions, “Animal rights and environmentalists protested the [seal] hunt from the 1960s through the ‘80s, but ongoing investigation by biologists and veterinarians revealed that none of their allegations were true. Seals were killed humanely, only after they were weaned and abandoned by the mothers. The herd was never endangered.... Those organizations that made millions of dollars from seal hunt protest were found to have entirely misrepresented all facts of the hunt. Harp seals eat fish and krill. They have grown to over 5 million animals and that abundance is bad news for them, for their prey, and for Canada’s fishermen, who have no other source of livelihood.”

IWMC also notes that “The seal hunt protest is being conducted by some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The animal rights campaign groups fail to acknowledge that the Canadian harp seal harvest is sustainable or that it benefits other species by controlling the rapid growth of one of the region’s main predators.”

I know a bit about this topic, because one of the journalistic hats I wear has been as a columnist for the commercial fishing trade publication Atlantic Fisherman since 1986, and I’ve covered the story off and on for years.

“But what does all this have to do with computers?”, you might well be asking. Well, as you may be aware, the environmental activist organization Greenpeace has been targeting Apple as their main IT industry whipping boy for the past year or so, mounting noisy “Green My Apple” protests at Apple trade shows and Apple stores, and implying that Apple products are particularly culpable contributors to global pollution and health risks to consumers.

For a recent example, ElectricNews.Net’s Emmet Ryan reports that while Steve Jobs touted the the iPhone’s recyclability and partial solar power in his Macworld Expo keynote, Greenpeace operatives demonstrated outside the show, projecting giant images of the contaminated Asian electronics scrapyards onto a wall above an Apple retail outlet.

One Greenpeace Web page contends that “Macs, iPods, iBooks and the rest of their product range contain hazardous substances that other companies have abandoned,” (they’re a bit behind the times, since it’s been eight months since the last iBooks were sold).

Jobs shot back at the Greenpeacers during his iPhone presentation, suggesting that the lobby group should “get out of the computer business [and] go save some whales.” Or seals?

Greenpeace goes on to charge that “right now, poison Apples full of chemicals (like toxic flame retardants, and polyvinyl chloride) are being sold worldwide. When they’re tossed, they usually end up at the fingertips of children in China, India and other developing-world countries. They dismantle them for parts, and are exposed to a dangerous toxic cocktail that threatens their health and the environment.”

Now this is no doubt partly true, but the misleading implication is that Apple is a worse offender than other computer and consumer electronics firms. Actually, it’s more than an implication. Greenpeace charges that “Of course Apple isn’t the only company that needs to change its ways. But in a recent Greenpeace scorecard, Apple ranked lower than HP, Dell, Nokia, and Sony. For an industry innovator, Apple is falling off the cart while the leaders of the industry are speeding ahead.”

The problem is that like the animal rights activists’ exploitation of whitecoat seals that haven’t been hunted for a generation, if the accusation of Apple being a laggard on environmental issues was at one time accurate, it is no longer true. Heck, Apple even has uber-environmentalist standard-bearer Al Gore on its board of directors.

For example, Greenpeace complains about “poison Apples full of chemicals (like toxic flame retardants, and polyvinyl chloride).” I won’t dispute that some such chemicals may be present in Apple products, but the health risk to consumers from, for example,. brominated flame retardants (BFRs), especially a variety called PBDEs which are persistent in the environment and contaminate the food chain, building up in the body tissues of animals, and people, are mainly found in the outer plastic casings of computers, printers and so forth is relatively low in Macs. Both Apple and Dell stopped using PBDE flame retardants in 2002, and Apple’s shift to metal computer cases obviously addresses that issue effectively. Apple has the largest proportion of metal-skinned computers (metal housings contain no flame retardants) of any of the major computer manufacturers.

Indeed, a rating system for computer environmental-friendliness developed by no less than the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ranks Apple’s metal-skinned MacBook Pro notebooks at the very top of the heap and Apple’s also metal-skinned Mac Pro tower was in a very respectable fifth place among desktop computers, behind only four Spirit models from Northern Micro.

The EPA’s “EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool)” is intended to “help institutional purchasers in the public and private sectors evaluate, compare and select desktop computers, notebooks and monitors based on their environmental attributes. EPEAT also provides a clear and consistent set of performance criteria for the design of products, and provides an opportunity for manufacturers to secure market recognition for efforts to reduce the environmental impact of its products.”

EPEAT evaluates electronic products according to three rating tiers of environmental performance – Bronze, Silver and Gold. The complete set of performance criteria includes 23 required criteria and 28 optional criteria in 8 categories. To qualify for acceptance as an EPEAT product, it must conform to all the required criteria. Manufacturers may pick and choose among the optional criteria to boost their EPEAT baseline “score” to achieve a higher-ranking level as follows:

Bronze
Product meets all required criteria.

Silver
Product meets all required criteria plus at least 50% of the optional criteria that apply to the product type being registered.

Gold
Product meets all required criteria plus at least 75% of the optional criteria that apply to the product type being registered.

The six higest-rated notebook computers are all Apple MacBook Pros - both 15” and 17” models, being the only ones in the category to score points in 17 optional criteria. The less-cheerful news is that even that showing was only enough to garner a “Silver” rating, and no computer or monitor product has yet achieved a “Gold” rating, so there is a lot more work to do.

However, the point here is that no HP, Lenovo or Dell computer broke 14 points, and Apple monitors also finish in mid-pack, beating offerings from those three firms.

So why does Greenpeace continue to pick on Apple in particular? Presumably because like cute and cuddly (at least as long as you don’t get close to a real one) whitecoat seals, Apple products are attractive, sure-fire, attention-getters - a powerful publicity icon to coattail, and Apple’s customer base (weighted toward people who likely voted for Al Gore in 2000) is perceived to be more receptive to environmentalist fundraising pitches than buyers of the more enterprise-oriented PC brands. It does not commend Greenpeace’s standard of ethics.

I don’t dispute for a moment that Apple and other electronics product manufacturers could and should do a lot better environmentally than they are, and potential toxicity of computers to their users is just one aspect of computer related pollution and threats to the environment. I don’t know whether Apple is doing a better or worse job with respect to product disposal and recycling than its competitors, and on pollution of developing countries with computer waste. However, given that Apple computer sales, until very recently, had been in the two to three percent range globally for about a decade, it’s difficult to credit the assertion that Apple products are a major contributor to that problem.

I’m certainly not insensitive to environmental issues. I am deeply troubled about the very real biodiversity crisis that is gripping our planet. Ten years ago, a United Nations report estimated that between 150 and 200 species of life were becoming extinct every 24 hours -almost entirely due to human industrial and resource-exploitation activity. Most of these disappearing species are very small organisms, but to put this extinction phenomenon into perspective, during the dinosaur age, animal species went extinct at a rate of about 1 per thousand years. Between 1600 and 1950, the rate was one species lost per decade. By 1980, we were losing one species per hour. At that time it was estimated that between 1980 and the year 2000, one out of six species on the planet would vanish, with about 500,000 species or 17% of the world’s remaining plant and animal life obliterated. If even the lower end (150 per year) of the UN figures is correct, by 1997 we were losing species at more than twice the rate projected in 1980. But seals are not even close to being an endangered species, and never have been, which is why I find the emphasis, effort, and expense being diverted to anti-seal hunting campaigns dishonest, offensive and outrageous.

At a personal level, I have been battling Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (MCS) for more than 35 years, and I can attest that new computers, including Apple’s metal-skinned ones, are anything but environmentally benign to someone who is chemically sensitive. Apple’s metal cased computers are obviously superior in terms of emissions of chemicals from their housings, but unfortunately their internal circuit boards are still way too pungent for many MCS people - in fact they seem to have gotten worse in that regard in recent years. Apple (and others) can and must do better in this area, and it would certainly be great if Apples were the first computer products to break that EPEAT “Gold” threshold.

But meanwhile, Greenpeace should acknowledge that Apple is doing better, rather than worse than its competitors in at least environmental user-friendliness.

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cmoore@macopinion.com

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