For those of you who missed the news that Apple had left the EPEAT certification programme in the USA, where have you been…
Anyway! EPEAT is an environmental ratings scheme designed to pick out the products which are more environmentally friendly than others. In the USA, EPEAT is used in many educational and governmental establishments as a quick filter as to products to buy for the institution.
Following the news last week of Apple’s withdrawal San Francisco city officials declared they would no longer buy Apple products, this was followed by a series of tiny announcements from other states – but given San Francisco is home to the Valley we are sure this was the big blow to Apple.
But Apple, it was thought, would just wait it out and for the mayhem and headlines to die down, but they didn’t. The fact is that more and more institutions were coming around to Apple’s hardware and software, but removal from EPEAT made this impossible and in essence would close this market to them.
Late last week a letter from the SVP of Hardware Engineering posted a letter to Apple’s website. The letter says the a mistake had been made and that all products formerly within the EPEAT certification would be reinstated as such. So all is good? erm… not quite
The Apple iPad and iPhone have never been EPEAT certified, almost everything is glued and so compact it would be almost impossible to (without huge effort) recycle them – so there is no EPEAT certification for them.
The straw that is believe to have broken the camels back and made Apple leave EPEAT is the new retina display in the Macbook Pro – it is glued in, a number of the chips and the battery are glued in and cannot be replaced nor easily removed for recycling. So, so far at least there is no EPEAT certification for this device, a device Apple would love to be inside institution’s. But there are rumours now that it may eventually get some kind of rating from EPEAT… but they are only rumours.
Thank you for reading “Can we come back and play EPEAT?” – Asks Apple, originally published on TechDrink. Ben Greenwood is the founder and editor of TechDrink. You can follow him on Twitter and Google+. You can also follow TechDrink on Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
