Apple has established quite the notoriety for doing things “the environmentally friendly way”. Whether it involves the recycling of used iOS devices in the most effective yet sophisticated ways imaginable, the straight up dissection of worn out hardware in an attempt to extrapolate its innermost valuable elements, or the simple fact that iMessage was deemed the world’s most environmentally conscious Messaging platform — Cupertino is a company that puts the environment first, time and time again, and is constantly working to reduce its carbon footprint.
Yet for all the good that Apple does for the world in which we live, the Silicon Valley tech-giant has recently came under fire for how it supposedly “mishandled the management of e-waste” at its Cupertino and Sunnyvale, California-based processing facilities.
As Reuters reported on Tuesday morning, Apple is accused of operating an e-waste shredding facility in its hometown of Cupertino, California between 2011 and 2012 — processing as much as 1.1 million pounds of e-waste material, according to the report, before the facility was shuttered by California State Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulators in January of 2013.
At issue, unfortunately, is that Apple operated the Cupertino facility without informing state regulators ahead of time — an obvious error, not so much related to what the company was doing, but to the terms under which Cupertino was doing it.
And, believe it or not, such was also the case at Apple’s Sunnyvale processing plant — which, according to the report, processed as much as 800,000 pounds of e-waste prior to EPA regulators finding out that the facility even existed in the first place.
What’s more, Apple reportedly “failed to report and track waste exports, or mark used oil containers as hazardous,” according to Reuters. As a result of the company’s “gross mishandling” of e-waste, Apple has agreed to pay as much as $450,000 in penalties to settle the claims of impropriety lodged against it by the California EPA.
Of course, while $450k for Apple may be a mere spit in the bucket, one also needs to consider the whole “public image” factor — the image of Apple, as a self-proclaimed world leader in the fight to employ environmentally sound practices, and as a company that so often touts the dramatic steps it’s taking to reduce its environmental footprint. Surely, this news isn’t going to help Apple’s bottom line in any way — but neither, in my unbiased opinion, will it hurt very much.
For a company like Apple, though, who has worked so tirelessly to establish an image of being so environmentally friendly, the fact that this issue ever became “an issue” in the first place is somewhat startling, in and of itself. Let’s just hope that Cupertino is also one of those companies that learns from its lessons, shall we?
What do you think about Apple’s alleged mishandling of e-waste? Let us know in the comments!
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