Wednesday, May 2, 2007

[Apple News] A GREEN APPLE A DAY...

keeps the planet's doctor away?

Apple just made an awesome announcement on their website today regarding their Green policy, recycling, and the future of their products. While it does give me a great feeling to see their policies laid out before us, it's also done in a very personal way...something Steve Jobs is still very good at. So it's filled with technical information about CRTs, mercury, lead and even that evil hexavalent chromium...and how Apple is going to do their best to increase the recycling of E-Waste.

Based on an idea from Dell, Apple assumes a 7 year lifespan for products, and compares the weight of products recycled in the current year, with the weight of products sold 7 years ago. Based upon that measurement, Apple recycled 9.5% of the weight of its sales from 7 years ago in 2006. They breakdown the growth of this project in that article from Jobs, so I won't bore you with it here.

However, as many folks would agree, this was by far and large the most interesting statement in the document from Steve Jobs...

"To eliminate mercury in our displays, we need to transition from fluorescent lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the displays. Fortunately, all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination, and therefore contain no mercury. We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Our ability to completely eliminate fluorescent lamps in all of our displays depends on how fast the LCD industry can transition to LED backlighting for larger displays."


So...along with the iPhone and the release of Leopard this year, we also seem to have some new Macs with to look forward to. We're curious to see what the consumer cost on these products is going to be, as they're currently pricey technology...maybe with some luck, Apple or it's ilk can find a way to bring that cost down...

Greener computers...who'd have thought Apple was ahead in this...


We do! :)

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