Apple Stepping Up Environmental Friendliness with New Halogen-Free Cables
The London Evening Standard reports (via GigaOM) that Apple is requiring cable supplier Volex to spend up to $6 million retooling its production lines to eliminate halogens from the power and USB cables used in the company's products. The move will make the cables less toxic to the environment upon disposal.
Apple is the biggest customer of Volex, 23%-owned by billionaire financier Nat Rothschild, which makes the power cables and USB leads used in everything from laptops to iPhones and iPads.
But the US firm is on a drive to move its products towards halogen-free power cables, which are less harmful to the environment when disposed of.
The start-up costs in designing and making the new cables will cost it up to $6 million in the current financial year, Volex said today, although, stripping out these one-off costs, profits will be in line with market expectation.
Apple has in the past received criticism from environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace, but the company has been performing better in recent surveys as it has continued to shift to more environmentally-friendly alternatives and has become more open about its efforts on the environmental front.
In 2009, the company launched an expanded environmental footprint section of its website to help provide information on its impact and progress in the area.
Popular Stories
Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories, according to the Apple leaker and prototype collector known as "Kosutami." In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Kosutami explained that Apple has stopped production of FineWoven accessories due to its poor durability. The company may move to another non-leather material for its premium accessories in the future. Kosutami has revealed...
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
The upcoming iOS 17.5 update for the iPhone includes only a few new user-facing features, but hidden code changes reveal some additional possibilities. Below, we have recapped everything new in the iOS 17.5 and iPadOS 17.5 beta so far. Web Distribution Starting with the second beta of iOS 17.5, eligible developers are able to distribute their iOS apps to iPhone users located in the EU...
The lead developer of the multi-emulator app Provenance has told iMore that his team is working towards releasing the app on the App Store, but he did not provide a timeframe. Provenance is a frontend for many existing emulators, and it would allow iPhone and Apple TV users to emulate games released for a wide variety of classic game consoles, including the original PlayStation, SEGA Genesis,...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. The lack of ...
Top Rated Comments
I dunno how you all get away with it. It's happened to the majority of the cables I own. Here's my desk at work, right now:
That cable sits on my desk its entire life. It doesn't travel or go in and out of bags. I never pull it out of the phone by tugging the cable. It just sits there. And yet, that happens.
Right. Speaking of cars, they illustrate the point well A significant amount of a car's lifetime carbon emissions comes from its manufacture. So generally, its better for the environment to keep an old car on the road longer, rather than produce a new, more efficient one. Longer lasting stuff = a reduction in energy and waste.
It's also interesting how Apple touts glass as such a highly recyclable material, and that it starting placing a sheet of it in front of every display not too long after all the hubbub about them not using environmentally friendly materials. But in reality, the glass (in all but the touchscreen devices) is entirely unnecessary. It simply adds more material to the device, which is against the 'reduce' principle. (Not to mention the reflections it adds to the displayworse than even a normal gloss display.) So you have to wonder how much of this is genuine concern for the environment, and how much is just marketing.
Yes, I, and dozens of other posters here at Mac rumors have been lying to you for years. We've been pulling on the cables and telling you we don't.
You got us.