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Apple Pulls Products from Environmental EPEAT Registry

Saturday July 7, 2012 12:15 am PDT by Arnold Kim
Apple has notified the Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) that it is withdrawing its products from the EPEAT registry and will no longer be submitting its products to EPEAT for environmental rating. CIO Journal spoke with Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT, who offered slightly more color to the decision:
“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”
EPEAT certification requires certain standards that make the machines easy to disassemble and recycle using common tools. Apple's recent Mac products, such as the Retina MacBook Pro, are difficult to fully disassemble making them ineligible for certification. iFixIt explains:
According to my EPEAT contacts, Apple’s mobile design direction is in conflict with the intended direction of the standard. Specifically, the standard lays out particular requirements for product “disassemble-ability,” a very important consideration for recycling: “External enclosures, chassis, and electronic subassemblies shall be removable with commonly available tools or by hand.”
The move could have a financial impact on Apple's sales. CIO Reports that many corporations require EPEAT certified computers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government requires 95% of electronics purchases also be EPEAT certified.

The move does not seem to affect Apple's popular iPhone and iPad devices, as they are presently a class of product not certified by EPEAT.

[ 305 comments ]


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Theclamshell
87 months ago
EPEAT certification requires certain standards that make the machines easy to disassemble and recycle using common tools.

*Stops wondering why Apple pulled products*
Rating: 73 Votes
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east85
87 months ago
This is a pretty sad moment, honestly. I mean this was helpful on the user end as well, even if you don't give a crap about the environment. It made their products more easily repairable and accessible for maintenance.
Rating: 65 Votes
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bluush
87 months ago

Who cares about the safety of the planet, I just want my computer to be a few millimeters thinner!


Exactly. So many Apple fans will demonize EPEAT over this in an attempt to brush over what a lame move by Apple this is. The stereotype that Mac users are nothing but liberals who pretend to care about social and environmental issues but deep down really don't care at all is validated by this move on Apple's part. Bypassing EPEAT just to have a new barely thinner laptop to release each year to please the crowds is not really the kind of company I like to do business with.
Rating: 62 Votes
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macingman
87 months ago
Interesting, I guess in the pursuit of thiness Apple is forced to use things which aren't enviromentally friendly like glue or whatever. Interesting as Apple used to use enviromental friendliness as a major selling point a few years back.
Rating: 46 Votes
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BlazednSleepy
87 months ago
To be honest, I'm a little disappointed in apple. I always appreciated the fact that these computers were highly recyclable and better on the environment than most electronics now a days. I figured apple would somehow develop a way to get these batteries off safely so they can be recycled.

If this is the way technology is going to become, getting smaller and lighter but less conscious about the world we live in then I'm not for it.:(
Rating: 43 Votes
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Pyrrhic Victory
87 months ago
Who cares about the safety of the planet, I just want my computer to be a few millimeters thinner!
Rating: 41 Votes
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colour
87 months ago

Interesting, I guess in the pursuit of thiness Apple is forced to use things which aren't enviromentally friendly like glue or whatever. Interesting as Apple used to use enviromental friendliness as a major selling point a few years back.


Exactly! I concreted my theory that apple has become predominantly about money and market share when the retina Macbook was released.

It's pretty disgusting IMO as I would have thought apple was design conscious towards environmental issues. As it turns out they were just using the whole thing as leverage for marketing and pushing sales as being "environmentally conscious" was trending. They worked around that and used it as their sales key.

Apples intentions are becoming more apparent as time goes on, first the macbook airs (which wasn't a bad idea) then the retina MBP designs... again, focusing on trends to maximize sales and furthermore charging unjustifiable prices for initial BTO upgrades.

Congrats apple, turns out you don't care for the environment... or anything else but power, money and market share.
Rating: 40 Votes
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ScottishCaptain
87 months ago
I've been an Apple user for a long time.

I will not be buying a "Retina" MacBook Pro solely because I do not agree with the direction those machines are heading in. If Apple continues to depreciate existing hardware in favour for machines that are literally held together with glue, then I will never buy an Apple laptop again.

There's a dozen ways in which Apple could have gone about the assembly of these machines differently, and left the lithium packs easily removable and serviceable. But they didn't- they sprang for the cheapest and fastest way of assembling the machine and covered the whole thing up with a healthy coating of "because we wanted to make it thinner" marketing ********.

These machines are disposable, plain and simple- the same way the iPad 2 is. They were never designed to be serviced, they were designed to fail and be replaced. You absolutely 100% have to purchase Applecare with the rMBP because you'd have to be insane not to- if your battery goes, the chassis is toast. If a single bit in your 16GB of main memory (note that the rMBP RAM is not ECC) goes, the logic board is toast. If your iSight breaks, your entire monitor is toast.

I'm all for thinner and lighter systems, but the rMBP has simply gone too far. And that's disappointing. And for the first time in a long time, I'm actually siding with the environmentalists on this one- I hope Apple feels the burn of their actions, and that this actually hurts them in the long run.

Only then will they realize how jaw-droppingly retarded building systems like this actually is, and we might get new models that are only marginally thicker (less then a millimetre) and actually serviceable.

-SC
Rating: 38 Votes
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TMar
87 months ago

Can't literally ripping a computer apart and smelting the metal be environmentally friendly?

Does recycle mean reuse in the standard? I got plenyt of old Dells that I can recycle but nobody would reuse their ancient parts. Actually most places want to charge me to recycle the,.

This all sounds like bureaucracy that Apple has already figured out a better way to deal with it?

Just wondering....


While I don't agree with the standard itself, this part of it is about if I have a faulty batter in my new macbook pro it's almost unrepairable. This isn't machines being repaired years after their prime but new machines being wasted because they are highly unrepairable.
Rating: 25 Votes
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swingerofbirch
87 months ago

This is a pretty sad moment, honestly. I mean this was helpful on the user end as well, even if you don't give a crap about the environment. It made their products more easily repairable and accessible for maintenance.


I agree that it creates a worse user experience:

* You can't carry an extra battery with you.
* If your battery dies, you can't buy one online. You need your computer serviced (out of commission).
* If your hard drive dies, you need service.
* If something in your computer besides your hard drive dies, you can't take it out and pop it in an enclosure to keep working while your computer gets repaired. In fact, if you send it in to be repaired, you could lose your hard drive data. What if you hadn't backed up? In the past, you could just take the drive out, seat it in a similar Mac or put it in an enclosure. Now, even if your drive is fully functional, but the computer won't work for another reason, and you send off your computer to be repaired for a separate issue, you have no way to retrieve the data, unless you had already backed up.

I think one mistake Apple made with making MacBooks like iPhones (in terms of nothing being user accessible and that the unit works or fails as one unit) is that they didn't switch the service strategy at the same time. With an iPhone, if your phone stops working you can swap it out same day at any Apple Store for a new unit. If it's an out of warranty issue, you pay a small percentage of the full retail value of the phone for a replacement. And with the iPhone Apple has tried to make full backups as unavoidable as possible (either through iTunes or iCloud).

I could see the closed unit MacBook working out better if Apple allowed for such simple exchanges, had super cheap prices for out of warranty replacements like they do iPhones, and the technology were there and used more often for frequent complete backups. But as it right now, it's a compromise. Apple repairs MacBooks by sending them off. Out of warranty repairs (logic board, display, for example) are not cost feasible. And a lot of people don't back up their computers. When you seal it all up, you take away the customer's ability to get around those compromising service issues.
Rating: 22 Votes

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