Apple and the environment

Apple is one of the largest multinational corporations that manufactures many different electronic, for example the iPhone, iPad, Mac's, Apple TV and iPod Touches. The company was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who quit their jobs to create a company who they named Apple Computers. Aside of Apple providing the best electronics currently available in the market, they are also one of the greenest company's out there. Apple has work over the years to decrease their environmental footprint's in many different ways. One of things that they have done is design smaller, lighter and thinner products, so less material are been used to created the product. Every year Apple has manage to decrease the amount of material use, for example today’s iMac’s have 55 percent less material than the first model. In addition, Apple has also rethink on the types of materials they use so that it doesn't impact the environment, everything from plastic, metal and glass. Some of these materials use are bad to the environment when they are not recycle, which causes damage to our environment. Another huge step that Apple has taken to lower their footprint is to not use many harmful chemicals like mercury, polyvinyl chloride, brominated flame retardants, and arsenic are not been used in any of their products. Chemicals like this are toxic to the environment in many ways, for instance Mercury affects the quality of the water which can than harm the fish on the lakes.. Other chemicals like Polyvinyl Chloride and Brominated flame retardants are also incredible toxic and are harmful for both the environment and also the human health, as claimed by usgs.gov "mercury can be a threat to the health of people and wildlife in many environments" . Furthermore, Apple also decrease their effect on the environment by creating smaller size packages which helps reduce the emissions that is produced when products are been transported to a location. Apple has manage to decrease a large amount of packaging for their products, for instance the amount of package use for the 13 inch MacBook Pro is 41 percent less than the old models.  As states by Apple "By reducing our packaging over 40 percent between 2006 and 2009, we ship 50 percent more boxes in each airline shipping container, that saves one 747 flight for every 32,000 units we ship“. Additionally Apple products are also energy efficient, meaning less energy is used when the product are hook up to the wall outlet which is good  for the user and at the same time the environment. A good example of an energy efficient product would have to be the Mac Mini, as stated by Apple, "It uses as little as a quarter of the power consumed by a typical light bulb". Apple power manganese system is well design, which makes it the only company that meets the EPA’s ENERGY STAR program requirement. So how does Apple manages to create an energy efficient product, well Apple custom designs both the hardware and the software on the product to make  the amount of power wasted decreased.. In addition, unlike many other large company's Apple has setup a recycle program were they have recycle more than 33 million pounds of electronic waste which is recycling rate of 41.9 percent. And finally, Apple also reduces energy use in their facilities in a couple of way. One of those thing that they have done to save energy is to install motion sensor and added energy-efficient lighting that helps save over two million kilowatt-hours of electricity. Apple employees also help reduce the carbon footprint by getting a ride to work by Apples public transportation incentives instead of driving their own car, that's a fewer percent of CO2e emissions every work day. This illustrates how Apple is not only focus on the user satisfaction, or on the product features but also on how it can be less harmful to the environment. And that's important since our environment is necessary for our survival, and without it than there will be no way to survive. Other companies that developed devices like notebooks, laptops, phones, etc, should join this revolutionary program which will help heal the environment from all the damage that has already been done to it.