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This article critiques the recent Apple advertisement on its progress against its 2030 Sustainability commitments. It covers the nuances surrounding "carbon neutrality" claims vis-a-vis "net zero" ones, the challenges of transforming the landscape of material recycling, the need for reporting on "life-cycle" value of emissions that includes the gamut of indirect upstream to downstream emissions, reporting sustainability numbers with context and in relative sense rather than absolute numbers which might sound big in form but make much less sense in function. Well, it's all of that, and much more - Question. Explore. Derive.
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By now, most of us have seen the Apple advertisement, which is its visual status report of 2023 towards its 2030 Sustainability commitments (here is the video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNv9PRDIhes)
The creative nervousness of Apple employees is shown quite brilliantly in the visuals. It also has certain stand-out elements which must be appreciated (time stamp from the video in brackets) - such as its near-term commitments of removing all plastic from its packaging by the end of next year and not decades down the line (1:44), moving away from merely planting trees to forests in Paraguay and Brazil, restored mangroves in Columbia and grasslands in Kenya (3:23). The most important element to recognize is when the Apple CEO, Tim Cook, says towards the end, "but, there is still a lot more work to do" (4:10).
Much appreciated is how tongue-in-cheek it is about current achievements and commitments in the space when Mother Nature says "This is my 3rd corporate responsibility gig today, so who wants to disappoint me first?" (1:31). This rare humility in the space of climate action is what we need even more of - not just celebrations of minor milestones, but, systemic changes that are embraced from the product development and new initiative ideation stage.
Let us dive a bit more into this viral video. The achievements and commitments mentioned in it are commendable in their own siloes for sure, but need to be analyzed thread-bare. What follows below is not an exercise in "exposing lies" or "exposing green-washing claims", but, a critical exercise in highlighting the gaps that continue to exist in how we look at achievements in the space of sustainability and net zero corporate-speak. Sharing them with their original time-stamps from the video (mentioned in brackets).
1) Apple says that from 2020 to 2030, it has committed to cut its carbon footprint to zero (1:09) and that "100% suppliers have committed to using clean renewable electricity" (2:56)
- What they fail to mention here is their 2020 commitment talked about “Carbon neutrality”. But, the world has changed a lot in the past three years and now what is being demanded more by corporates is genuine harm reduction and achievement of Net Zero without just a focus on off-sets.
- Notice how in the video they talk about “renewable electricity” for the suppliers while it talked about “renewable energy” for itself. There is a difference there, as electricity is a much smaller sub-set of the “energy” conundrum.
- Most importantly, by when will this commitment be achieved by the suppliers? No disclosures yet on this. This is going to be a mammoth task. A quick look at two of its annual documents on “People and Environment in our Supply Chain Report” and “Conflict Mineral Disclosures” is enough to show that a lot more indeed has to be done. Kudos to the extremely insightful disclosures done in these reports, as its baseline transparency on the same.
2) The ad says that it is "using 100% recycled aluminum in the enclosures of all our MacBook, Apple TVs, Apple watch" (1:54)
- But, what about gold, tungsten, cobalt and other rare earth metals? It is now evident through the boom in the Electric Vehicle industry, and the challenges it is facing today in terms of the reducing “life-cycle carbon emissions” of inputs materials and human rights abuse for material extraction covers the like of metals like Cobalt, Nickle, Lithium, Manganese et al. Let’s start hearing more and more corporates, policy-makers and researchers talk about this harmful affect of the technological and renewable revolution we are going through right now i.e., the impact of material extraction as Step 1, from the most under-developed and mineral-rich regions of the world.
- Is there a larger cross-industry coalition on rare metals access that needs to be created at a trans-national level, to address such deeper issues? It is here that I am reminded of the lines Siddharth Kara wrote in his book Cobalt Red (How the blood of Congo powers our lives, when he wrote “The biggest problems faced by Congo’s artisanal miners (of Cobalt, Copper & other minerals) is that the stakeholders up the chain refuse to accept accountability for them, even though they all profit from their work. Corporations should treat the miners as equal employees to the people who work at the corporate headquarters.”
3) It also talks about how "every apple office, store and data centre runs on clean electricity" (2:27)
- This is the “carbon-cost” of running these buildings. Not the cost of making these buildings and storage centers. What we miss, when we all often talk about sustainability is that there is no point in efficiently running a system that was designed to pollute at its inception. Let's start questioning this even more & more, as the cost of running an operation carbon-efficiently eventually is counter productive if the carbon-cost to make such operations was abysmally high. The more we demand disclosures on “life cycle emissions”, the more we will get access to transparent information across a company’s’ value-chain. My experiences in having understood the scope 1, 2 & 3 emissions made me realize the usually reported Scope 1 & 2 estimate to be roughly (only) 20% of the total supply-chain emissions of an organization - hence, the need to probe ourselves even more on the hard to measure and reduce upstream as well as downstream Scope 3 emissions.
4) "Shipping more products by sea rather than air, which reduces transportation emission by 95%" (3:03)
- On face value, this is a sensible move. But, is this another case of a commercially sensible decision, which is passed off as environmentally-friendly one for the carbon-cutting benefits that it also brings along with it? The questions to ask yourself in these cases to get to the primary reasons for such decisions is the fallowing (i) Is higher sea shipping an outcome of manufacturing being limited to certain low-wage-cost locations of the world? Is the deeper solution then in near-shoring? (ii) How much is the cost benefit/loss of such decisions? Is sea shipping in the routes Apple products ships is product, just inherently much more cheaper than air freight? Knowing this in tandem with carbon-cost savings, gives us the entire picture.
5) "We have reduced our water usage by 63 billion gallons" (3:51)
- This is a classic number-hyperbole which hides the real facts. Ask yourself a few questions whenever you hear such achievements being thrown at you (i) How much was the water usage before (in its baseline year) (ii) How much is the % reduction till date (iii) How does this compare to its peers in the industry (iv) How does this industry compare to other manufacturing sectors in terms of water usage, in general (v) How much will this go down to, by 2030 (or the next milestone year) (vi) Are these incremental / operational efficiency improvements, or are there transformative technologies which have helped the company transform the input-material usage landscape.
- Beyond the general aspects of interpreting water saving numbers of a manufacturing entity, I was also curious to explore a bit more about what really was the calculation behind the “63 billion gallons of savings”. I dropped into their 2022 Annual ESG report and asked a few exploratory questions. (i) Is this savings in just in its own facilities, as its Annual ESG report talks about using only 1.4 billion gallons of water in its own facilities. Hence, is this creative usage of water reduced numbers across its supply-chain? (ii) But, then, its own 2022 Annual ESG report (page 19) also talks about how its Clean Water Program with its suppliers has saved 50 billion gallons of water, since 2013! So, did it just casually pass off a 10 year achievement number as a given in time reduction of water usage?
- Only when you have a fair assessment on the above six questions, would you really be able to contextualize “63 billion gallons” as being high, low or absolutely abysmal as an “achievement”. Hence, the best decision the content creators could have taken in this case, is to NOT have highlighted this stand-alone factoid in a video, but, rather disclosed it separately in their annual report or a media brief directed to corporate water stakeholders in specific.
6) They talk about doing "a mix of clean energy and eliminating GHG emissions" (2:40) and then go on to announce their very first carbon neutral product, the watch (4:28)
- When you double-click, you will realize that the fine-print says that only certain watches will be carbon neutral- based on a select combination of cases and bands.
- Carbon neutrality as a concept can be achieved by off-setting, and not only by reducing Green House Gas emissions (in its 2020 announcement, Apple had a 75:25 plan anyway – with 25% being through off-sets).
- Remember, that only earlier this week, EU has announced banning sweeping claims on "Carbon neutrality" by 2026, unless such claims are backed up by accurate and non-greenwashed evidence, which display performance in inherent environmental excellence.
7) Towards the end it says that by 2030, all of apple's devices will have a net zero climate impact (4:40)
- The elephant in the room that Apple does not address is how much of this would happen by embedding harm reduction to the environment and society, inherently into the creation of a new product or sustenance of an older one. Is it even a win on net zero, if planned early "product retirement" is in-built into own business plans?
- Hence, how does Apple plan to address the reality (not accusations anymore) of "planned obsolescence" which is the biggest problem in its supply-chain. Why not let the consumers decide when to get rid of and how much of their product to repair? The Japanese have a concept of "Kintsugi", which is the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas breakage with lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. Would be great to hear from an Apple on when we will start celebrating breakage of its phones as a part of its history to renovate, rather than something to disguise to build up for their next product launch.
I can imagine how the original brief for this advertisement would have been very aspirational and authentic, but, the outcome is a muddle of mostly typically safe corporate-sustainability speak. Hence what happens is that Apple eventually falls into the corporate sustainability-speak gap, that it had itself opened up as a gap at the starting of the video.
Now that Apple has taken the brave tongue-in-cheek approach through its video of taking head-on the conservative commitments and achievement gaps in general in the corporate sustainability space; it has put itself out there – to be appreciated and criticized. The ideal thing for Apple to do next would be to address the above genuine systemic gaps that prevent a larger sustainability transformation in its industry - and talk about how it plans to play an industry-leading role in the same - just like it has played a leadership role in creativity, innovation and consumer-centricity for at least four decades now.
The consumers are listening. The sustainability enthusiasts are listening.
And yes, so is Mother Nature.
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Originally posted on September 27, 2023
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