Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products are a red herring | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s first ‘carbon neutral’ products are a red herring

theverge.com

27 pointsmikece35 comments

> Apple announced that its Watch Series 9 marks its first carbon-neutral product. But focusing on the watch distracts from the bigger picture of the company’s climate impact.

Well what a tautological pointless observation. Apple themselves expressly explained exactly this, and laid out an objective to address the rest by 2030.

Journalism seems kinda swirling the drain with diminishing value add to public knowledge, all for eyeballs and clickbait to get them.

I'm curious about people's take on leather from a sustainability, climate, and a morality (animal product) point of views.

On one hand, cattle production is not great on the above points. On the other hand, I heard that leather is a by-product of the meat industry - i.e. the cattle would be raised either way.

> On the other hand, I heard that leather is a by-product of the meat industry - i.e. the cattle would be raised either way.

Sure, but still seem worth it!

Right now the by-product generates additional profit per animal. If we all stop using leather, the by-product becomes a liability and they need to do something else with it that costs them money.

All of this means to retain their initial profit per animal, the cost is transferred to the meat consumer. Which in turn might help drive sustainability through lower meat consumption.

You actually changed my opinion in this.

ditto : well said, opinion changed. and thank you.

Here's my take on Apple's leather goods from a purely practical, selfish point of view:

I've been using their leather cases for years. I think the newer versions are lower quality than the old ones. I wouldn't buy another one now even if they kept making them.

All of the good reasons you mentioned aside, if Apple's not going to make their leather goods top-quality, then it's better to drop the line altogether.

Exactly this - I think leathergoods are worthwhile because they last (and quality leather should last a very long time - and in that time you'll have run through several plastic versions of the product, and shed a vast amount of microplastics into the environment in the process) but Apple's simply don't anymore. Their leather loop watch bands were a key example - they laminated very thin layers of leather together with other materials, and the resulting product just fell apart after a year's use.

I agree. I've had a leather jacket for 20+ years. I have leather boots that I keep clean and re-sole every now and then. I wore a pair of leather Birkenstocks through several sets of soles until the cork bed literally fell apart.

I understand the animal rights perspective here. The eco perspective is that with a little care you can make leather goods last a very long time.

The process of turning the animal skin into usable leather orobably has environmental effects as well. Likely lots of water is needed and chemicals.

They're doing it because they can market pleather as "vegan leather" now for the same price as real leather, and it's simpler to standardize on that. It's polyurethane or PVC.

The good thing about it is that it doesn't require raising and killing an animal.

Bad things include that it's made from petrochemicals and does not biodegrade.

Doesn't seem like a clear win for ecology.

Leather is worth it for longer life products. The fact that this is discussed over the outsized pollution the device itswlf generates just shows how out of touch consumers are with their actual environmental effect.

> It’s just that the supposed sustainability of any single product doesn’t necessarily tell us how much progress the company is making overall toward its climate goals.

This is literally a non-article

I m just surprised that they said that leather is unsustainable.

> A company might make a single product less carbon-intensive, for example. But if it winds up selling more of that product than it used to, it might end up pumping out as much or even more greenhouse gas emissions than it used to.

But if it's carbon neutral, it doesn't really matter does it? The increased greenhouse gas emissions are offset by some carbon capture.

greenhouse gas emissions are not the only thing that needs to be looked at regarding sustainability

It's the existential issue of our time. It absolutely deserves primacy. If you have a significant secondary issue, you should mention.

> It's the existential issue of our time. It absolutely deserves primacy.

it's still not the only one, even if it does

> If you have a significant secondary issue, you should mention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_boundaries

Primacy means it's the most significant issue. Of course it's not the only one. Prioritization matters to a huge degree, and climate change deserves prime position.

Of course that are other resource constraint issues, but resolving the energy crisis resolves a large number of such issues, which again further reinforces the primacy of dealing with climate change. I can't think of a single resource crisis that could justify even approaching the priority of climate change, and just gesturing at every single resource limit on the planet doesn't convince me to change my thoughts on priority.

you are arguing against a straw man.

I say you can't just ignore everything besides co2 emissions.

You argue for co2 emissions being the most important thing

That's a pretty fair summary except I'd add it's the most important by a huge margin across many dimensions. There's definitely significant daylight between what we've written, but a lot of agreement too.

Pollution beoynd simple carbon is a bigger issue with zero doubt. Id rather a 10degree hotter planet where you can stilk drink the water.

Climate change deserves to be the prime issue because we're accelerating towards very bad, very wide-ranging effects, that will eventually be irreversible (on the time scale of human civilization). That's not true to anywhere near the same degree for any other global environmental issue. The primary way we might "soon" ruin a lot of our drinking water is through climate change, and even change that's far less significant than your 10 degrees remark.

> But if it's carbon neutral, it doesn't really matter does it?

An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure.

By not generating the carbon emissions in the first place, you then have to have a bunch of rigamarole cleaning it up.

I hate carbon neutrality as marketing. It all means is that they got some carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions. Oil companies could change literally nothing in their production pipelines and claim there are carbon-neutral by acquiring those credits somewhere and/or planting some trees (and lobbying to increase how many carbon credits are given for that)

Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. It's also causing water issues in regards to the Colorado River as the majority of the water is used for cattle feed.

If you look at it from that perspective then using leather is unsustainable given our current projected path.

Luckily enough, Colorado River is not worldwide. And luckily enough the world is not USA, so you can stop projecting whatever practices USA has to be worldwide.

And also, they claim 95% less pollution by flying their products instead of shipping them by boat. Do they really expect us to believe they were flying all these devices?

The whole thing is an exercise in how to lie with statistics.

Also, I always buy a leather case for my iPhone. Now I’m just going to order one from Bellroy or Nomad instead of buying fake leather. It’s like Apple Watch bands I never buy from Apple. If you don’t provide the product I want, I just buy it somewhere else.

yes, most of it is transported by air. this has been known for a long time. from a quick google search:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-09-11/the-iphon...

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/technology/iphone-china-a...

https://www.macrumors.com/2014/09/15/iphone-deliveries-from-...

iPhones and iPads were always air freight. All that just-in-time stuff. Covid, supply chain, port issues probably made conversion to sea freight untenable until recently.

Buy a customized Apple computer,trackong shows it ships from China and arrives in a couple days. That's definitely not a boat.

Is your customized computer going to take a month or two to arrive now though?

Every mac I've bought in the last ~15 years has had <24 hour delivery from China, so either they're flying it, have some magical teleporter, or are completely lying in their order tracking for no clear reason.

Apple has a long history of first implementing new tech in the watch lineup before expanding it to the iPhone. So the fact that they are doing it here for their carbon neutral efforts is not surprising.

Is 'carbon neutral' still a talking point? I thought we had moved on to being 'water positive'.

How much carbon did they burn to fly in the actresses and a movie production crew for “Mother Earth “ not to mention the marketing trips in organizing this fantasy production

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