What's the iPad's environmental record?
Apple reports that it sold over forty million iPads worldwide during 2018, for an average of 120,000 devices per day. These colossal figures raise questions about the resources mobilized to achieve production and distribution on such a scale.
After all, an iPad is a complex object to build, requiring a wide range of materials before it can be transported to the four corners of the world.
Given that it was virtually impossible to imagine intuitively the resources involved in this manufacturing process, Newzik decided to shed some light on the subject following numerous requests for information on the ecological footprint of playing music on the iPad.*.
Our study will be structured in two parts. First, we'll approach the subject from an extremely broad perspective, to define the entire lifecycle of an iPad, the device for which Newzik was designed, and to analyze the relevance of the indicators currently in use.
We'll then take a closer look at bars and the progress made in terms of the tablet's energy balance. We'll also look at areas for improvement, based in particular on Apple's environmental report, but also on our research and interactions with various associations.
1) How do you measure the ecological impact of an iPad?
Understanding the product life cycle.
To measure the ecological impact of an iPad, we first need to understand each stage of our tablet's life cycle. We start at the top left of our diagram, and work our way clockwise.
Extraction of materials
This stage involves sourcing raw materials, whether very common materials (such as plastic) or rarer resources (such as lithium for batteries).
Production
This stage is understood quite instinctively: it consists of transforming and assembling all the recovered materials into a functional iPad. This stage takes place entirely in the factory.
Packaging and transport
Packaging takes place once the iPads have been assembled. It involves packing them to make them ready for sale. The iPads are then transported to the appropriate sales points.
Use
Usage consists of everything you, as a user, do with your iPad between the time you buy it and the time it stops working.
End of life
End-of-life means disposing of an electronic product as cleanly as possible, if possible via a recycling policy.
Now that you know the complete cycle of an iPad, it's time to discover the "rating criteria" used to measure a product's environmental impact.
Key indicators
Let's define what we're going to base our observations on when it comes to the ecological impact of Apple's tablet.
1. Fossil fuels vs. renewable energies
Fossil energy" is defined as any energy source derived from the fossilization of living organisms. More specifically, it refers to oil, coal and all their compounds. These fossil fuels are available in limited quantities on Earth, as they take a very long time to form.
Renewable energies, on the other hand, are constantly renewed by nature, but generally carry less energy than their fossil counterparts. All forms of renewable energy come from two sources: the Sun (from which wind, water cycles and plant growth derive) and the Earth (whose heat is a major source of energy). So, one of the main angles of attack when studying the energy consumption of any human activity is to determine the cleanliness of the energy sources used.
2. Activity-related carbon footprint
The carbon footprint refers to the quantity of greenhouse gases released by an activity: it is expressed in CO2 equivalent, i.e. the quantity (in kg) of CO2 required to produce the same effect on global warming. This indicator is frequently used to quantify an activity's pollution and its emissions of gases contributing to global warming.
The higher its carbon footprint, the more polluting an activity is deemed to be. Greenhouse gas-emitting activities are mainly involved in resource extraction, factory production and transport to the various world markets.
At a time when the environment is at the center of many debates, you may find it surprising that thereare hardly any standards governing the carbon emissions of private players. In fact, ecological regulation today takes two main forms:
Banning certain products (the example of glyphosate has recently been in the news)
An obligation of relative transparency regarding the carbon emissions of each company, which is achieved above all through the use (or not) of eco-labels.
This last measure is very interesting: it shows us that the consumer is the master of the ecological transition. By forcing companies to be more transparent about their polluting activities, governments are making eco-responsibility a competitive and strategic element in the marketplace. Indeed, these labels indicate who the "good students" are in terms of ecological commitment.
3. The use of rare materials
Measuring an activity's carbon footprint or energy consumption isn't always enough to fully assess its ecological impact. Indeed, some products (of which the iPad is one) require certain rare resources for their manufacture. This is true of all smartphones and tablets, which use resources such as lithium, gold, silver and neodymium, one of the planet's least abundant compounds.
These are not energy sources per se, but rather minerals or metals. However, like fossil fuels, they require extraction and are not renewable. The allocation of these materials must therefore be taken into account when considering an activity: this is known asresource depletion.
2) Analysis of strengths and areas for improvement.
A shift towards renewable energies.
The Apple brand's first area of action concerns green energies, and its growing use of them.
It's probably in the field of clean energy that Apple has made the most progress in recent years. The highlights in this direction are very simple to understand and speak for themselves:
As for the energy source, Apple has since 2018 ensured that its factories are powered by renewable energy.
The brand also exercises rigorous control over its suppliers, imposing eco-responsibility criteria.
The data centers (i.e. the physical locations where the many servers hosting user data are concentrated) linked to Apple services such as iMessage, Siri, FaceTime and iTunes also run entirely on renewable energy.
Finally, the brand's energy consumption per device has also been drastically reduced in recent years. Apple's Progress report informs us that the average power consumption of their products has fallen by 70% since 2009.
So, not only has per-unit consumption fallen considerably in recent years, it's also coming from cleaner sources than before.
The question of transport
A point rarely mentioned by Apple concerns the transportation of finished products. While factories and devices have become less and less polluting, the transportation of goods has changed little since the brand exploded in popularity at the end of the 2000s.
For the time being, performance imperatives prevent Apple from using an eco-responsible mode of transport. This aspect of the Apple product life cycle is not well documented in the brand's environmental reports.
One point of improvement worth mentioning is that of the Apple Stores: by creating its own distribution channels (the Apple Stores), the brand has succeeded in creating internal merchandise circuits that are less polluting. However, the unimaginable number of resellers and the multiplication of e-commerce services (with Amazon at the top of the list, of course) mean that we have to qualify this improvement.
If you want to reduce your environmental impact, we strongly recommend that you go directly to the store to buy your Apple products!
In addition to the thousands of other distributors who require additional transport channels, we also need to take into account the fact that products sold via Amazon (and other e-commerce platforms) are often shipped by air, the most polluting mode of transport.
Let's move on to our second issue: the carbon footprint of an iPad's life cycle.
The iPad's carbon footprint.
If we focus our analysis on the latest iPad Pro model, official data tells us that an iPad induces an emission of 113kg of CO2 equivalent over its lifecycle.
Compare this with the carbon emissions of a standard book (500 grams). According to this articlewe learn that a book emits just over 1.2 kg of CO2 equivalent over its entire life cycle. By this logic, the production of an iPad would emit as much greenhouse gas as the production of 94 books. In the absence of reliable data, we'll assume that a sheet of music produces as much greenhouse gas as a standard book.
In the context of a professional musical practice, it seems reasonable to assert that a musician will be required to play over 94 different scores between the purchase of his iPad and its end-of-life.
We have two figures to support this intuition:
A symphony orchestra prints around 57,000 pages a year of "home-made" sheet music for its musicians, the equivalent of 380 books a year just for photocopying;
On average, a 108-piece British orchestra produces 416,000kg of CO2 equivalent during a tour of Asia. This is equivalent to the emissions of around 3,700 iPads.
We've also prepared a brief graph illustrating equivalence in terms of carbon footprint.
We leave it to you to calculate the CO2 equivalents between an iPad and the other devices in your daily life. It's also worth noting that an iPad isn't just for reading. A tablet also lets you digitally import your music, magazines, comics, films and other applications.
What's more, while it's absolutely impossible to put a figure on the scale of this phenomenon, we wanted to point out the immense amount of carbon involved in transporting paper scores between orchestras: often these scores are simply rented for a handful of performances, and then sent back either to the publisher or to another orchestra. Given their volume, these scores require colossal resources to be transported from publishers' storage spaces around the world. Without being in a position to give any figures, we simply wanted to give you a heads-up: printing and the use of raw materials are not the only polluting activities involved in playing music on paper. In fact, they are probably in the minority when compared with the colossal flow of scores around the world.
If we now turn our attention to the proportions of carbon emissions by activity, the graph below shows us that our intuitions are often wrong!
In fact, when you buy an iPad, 95% of the greenhouse gases produced by the product are already in the atmosphere. Contrary to popular belief, you should therefore make your ecological choices before you buy, rather than modulating your use of the tablet (more on this at the end of the article).
Indeed, Apple's tablet achieves a near flawless performance in terms of "use", with energy consumption 68% below the EnergyStar eco-label threshold! Understandably, this label is difficult for many brands to obtain, and Apple's energy consumption record is among the best in the world. This information is proclaimed loud and clear in the iPad's iPad environmental report. By using less energy, your tablet requires less effort from data centers, uses less electricity to charge and therefore has a smaller carbon footprint.
Apple is constantly improving its carbon footprint per device, and this can be seen at several stages in the life cycle of their products. If you had to remember just one figure, it would be this: Apple has reduced its total greenhouse gas emissions by 35% compared to 2015.
A brand that is gradually freeing itself from its dependence on rare materials.
Diving into both the iPad's environmental report and Apple's progress report, we quickly realize that the brand is aware of the importance of resource depletion in our society, and is seeking to free itself from certain constraints without necessarily succeeding.
Highlights
In terms of production, Apple has embarked on a program of improved water management. In concrete terms, the Californian brand's actions for better water management consist of :
Reducing the volume of water used
More responsible dumping to prevent pollution
When it comes to thepackaging of finished products, Apple has also initiated a number of changes to improve its consumption of raw materials. From now on, the boxes of your iPads :
Plastic-free
95% plant fiber, 38% of which is recycled
Use only wood from ecologically managed forests.
Dealing with damaged or unusable products is the area in which Apple is most proactive. The brand has launched a program that is still too little known these days, Apple Give Back, introduced in 2018. With Apple Give Back, you can test the egibility of your old devices, which will lead to one of the following decisions:
If your device is eligible, it will be exchanged for an Apple Store gift card;
If your device doesn't qualify, it will be handed over to Apple, who will dispose of it in the most eco-responsible way possible, free of charge (in fact, 25 cents are earmarked for recycling when you buy an iPad).
The management of obsolete devices is therefore the spearhead of Apple, which has succeeded in introducing a sustainable waste treatment process that has virtually no carbon footprint and prevents the waste of many precious resources. Indeed, the recycling enabled by Apple Give Back helps to create a kind of "circular supply chain": the still-functioning components of old Apple devices are used in the manufacture of new products. The key, however, is for users to be aware of the program's existence, and to actually make use of it.
Avenues for improvement
The extraction of rare minerals is one of the few areas in which the brand has very little room for manoeuvre, as it cannot do without certain materials to produce its tablets. These materials can range from common but polluting products (e.g. aluminum) to much rarer chemical elements such as lithium.
The Apple brand is well aware of this challenge, and has therefore identified 14 priority materials on which current and future efforts will be focused: aluminum, cobalt, copper, glass, gold, lithium, paper, plastic, scarce earth compounds, steel, tin, zinc, tantalum and tungsten.
There are several speeds of progress, depending on the material in question. In fact, there are three main categories:
Materials increasingly used in recycled form (aluminum, paper, steel and tin);
Materials gradually replaced by less polluting alternatives (copper and plastic);
The materials that Apple is seeking to recycle, without so far succeeding convincingly (cobalt, glass, gold, rare earth compounds, tungsten, tantalum, zinc and lithium).
Conclusion
An important point that all readers should bear in mind as they conclude this article concerns Apple's willingness to present itself as one of the good students in the fight against climate disruption. This marks a real shift in the brand's strategy, which now seems to be integrating eco-responsibility into its brand image.
The main advances concern the shift towards clean energy, both during production and in the amount of energy needed to run Apple products.
The second major achievement in recent years concerns carbon emissions per device, which are used to offset the increase in the quantity of Apple products. Imagine that, compared to the 113 kg of CO2 emissions from our tablet, a standard Dell computer emits between 200 and 300 kg (i.e. twice as much).
The depletion of resources is therefore the main area on which the brand is now focusing its efforts, after winning its bet on energy sources and carbon emissions. One thing is certain: using an iPad is increasingly eco-responsible!
The current figures can obviously be improved, and a company of Apple's size has a duty to be exemplary in its environmental fight.
Bonus: Three tips to reduce your ecological footprint.
Of course, there are ways you can reduce your impact on the environment, both when you buy your iPad and when you use it.
Before you buy
If you already own an Apple device, we warmly invite you to replace it only if it stops working properly. Most electronics manufacturers make considerable marketing efforts to encourage you to buy before your current product becomes defective. However, buying a new device is not only polluting because of the resources mobilized for its production, but also because, on a large scale, it considerably increases the volume of sales worldwide. By contributing to the increase in demand, we greatly contribute to the increase in quantities produced.
An extremely environmentally-friendly practice is to buy reconditioned products: they're just as good as the ones you'll find in the stores, they're cheaper, and you don't needlessly feed the demand for the big brands: the main obstacle to these products is psychological. If you're willing to give it a try, it can drastically reduce your ecological footprint.
After purchase
While it's true that the consumption of Apple products is much lower than the market average, it's important to understand that this doesn't mean that the use you make of your tablet will have no impact on your environmental footprint.
Let's take an extremely common example: you're watching a YouTube video at home. Strictly speaking, your device's consumption will be reduced if you use an iPad, but Apple has no control over the consumption of the servers of the site in question, YouTube.
To sum up: Although the pollution coming directly from your device is limited, you have considerable leeway on "global" pollution by reasoning your tablet usage.
