Apple says its supply chains and products will be carbon neutral by 2030

Published July 21, 2020

Apple this morning announced plans to make its entire business carbon neutral within the next 10 years. The news follows the company’s push toward a fully carbon neutral corporate structure, adding its manufacturing supply chain and resulting products into the mix.

The roadmap to sustainability as released today is part of the company’s annual Environmental Progress Report. Reducing every device it sells to zero climate impact means a couple of things. The primary concern is finding ways to reduce emissions from productions by 75%. The remainder will be focused on efforts to help remove carbon from the atmosphere.

The company has already begun pushing to make a larger percentage of its products from recycled materials, thanks in part to its own in house robots Dave and Daisy (serious 2001 vibes), which recover key rare earth magnets and tungsten, along with some steel recovery. The company also runs its own Material Recovery Lab in Austin, with help from engineers at Carnegie Mellon.

Apple says it’s working with more than 70 energy suppliers to go 100% renewable for its production centers, a partnership it believes will reduce roughly the same amount of carbon emissions annually as three million cars. The company is also working to launch one of the world’s biggest solar arrays in Europe. As far as the remaining 25% of carbon reduction, there are a number of initiatives outlined in the report, including efforts to restore forests in Africa and South America.

There are also plans to launch an “Impact Accelerator,” aimed at investing in minority-owned businesses launched as part of the company’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. As for how that relates to the topic of sustainability, VP Lisa Jackson says in a press release, “Systemic racism and climate change are not separate issues, and they will not abide separate solutions. We have a generational opportunity to help build a greener and more just economy, one where we develop whole new industries in the pursuit of giving the next generation a planet worth calling home.”

Apple has generally received high marks from Greenpeace in recent years for its aggressive efforts to limit the impact of its massive global operations.

Salesforce is building an app to gauge a company’s sustainability progress

Published September 18, 2019

Salesforce has always tried to be a socially responsible company, encouraging employees to work in the community, giving 1% of its profits to different causes and building and productizing the 1-1-1 philanthropic model. The company now wants to help other organizations be more sustainable to reduce their carbon footprint, and today it announced it is working on a product to help.

Patrick Flynn, VP of sustainability at Salesforce, says that it sees sustainability as a key issue, and one that requires action right now. The question was how Salesforce could help. As a highly successful software company, it decided to put that particular set of skills to work on the problem.

“We’ve been thinking about how can Salesforce really take action in the face of climate change. Climate change is the biggest, most important and most complex challenge humans have ever faced, and we know right now, every individual, every company needs to step forward and do everything it can,” Flynn told TechCrunch.

And to that end, the company is developing the Salesforce Sustainability Cloud, to help track a company’s sustainability efforts. The tool should look familiar to Salesforce customers, but instead of tracking customers or sales, this tool tracks carbon emissions, renewable energy usage and how well a company is meeting its sustainability goals.

Image: Salesforce

The tool works with internal data and third-party data as needed, and is subject to both an internal audit by the Sustainability team and third-party organizations to be sure that Salesforce (and Sustainability Cloud customers) are meeting their goals.

Salesforce has been using this product internally to measure its own sustainability efforts, which Flynn leads. “We use the product to measure our footprint across all sorts of different aspects of our operations from data centers, public cloud, real estate — and we work with third-party providers everywhere we can to have them make their operations cleaner, and more powered by renewable energy and less carbon intensive,” he said. When there is carbon generated, the company uses carbon offsets to finance sustainability projects such as clean cookstoves or helping preserve the Amazon rainforest.

Flynn says increasingly the investor community is looking for proof that companies are building a real, verifiable sustainability program, and the Sustainability Cloud is an effort to provide that information both for Salesforce and for other companies that are in a similar position.

The product is in beta now and is expected to be ready next year. Flynn could not say how much they plan to charge for this service, but he said the goal of the product is positive social impact.

Hear Salesforce chairman, co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff discuss business as the greatest platform for change at Disrupt SF October 2-4. Get your passes to the biggest startup show around.

Scalable, low-cost technologies needed to repair climate, Cambridge professor suggests

Published May 10, 2019

Cambridge University has proposed setting up a research center tasked with coming up with scalable technological fixes for climate change.

The proposed Center for Climate Repair is being coordinated by David King, an emeritus professor in physical chemistry at the university and also the U.K. government’s former chief scientific adviser.

Speaking to the BBC this morning, King suggested the scale of the challenge now facing humanity to end greenhouse gas emissions is so pressing that radical options need to be considered and developed alongside efforts to shift societies to carbon neutral and shrink day to day emissions.

“What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years. There is no major centre in the world that would be focused on this one big issue,” he told BBC News.

In an interview on the BBC Radio 4’s “Today” program, King said the center would need to focus on scalable, low-cost technologies that could be deployed to move the needle on the climate challenge.

Suggested ideas it could work to develop include geoengineering initiatives, such as spraying sea water into the air at the north and south poles to reflect sunlight away and refreeze them; using fertilizer to regreen portions of the deep ocean to promote plankton growth; and carbon capture and storage methods to suck up and sequester greenhouse gases so they can’t contribute to accelerating global warming.

On the issue of nuclear power, King said interesting work is being done to try to develop viable nuclear fusion technology — but also pointed to untapped capacity in renewable energy technologies, arguing there is an “ability to develop renewables far more than we thought before.”

If established, the Center for Climate Repair, would be attached to the university’s new Cambridge Carbon Neutral Futures Initiative, which is a research hub recently set up to link climate-related research work across the university — and “catalyse holistic, collaborative progress towards a sustainable future”, as it puts it.

“If [the Center for Climate Repair] goes forward, it will be part of the Carbon Neutral Futures Initiative, which is led by Dr Emily Shuckburgh,” a spokeswoman for the university confirmed.

“When considering how to tackle a problem as large, complex and urgent as climate change, we need to look at the widest possible range of ideas and to investigate radical innovations such as those proposed by Sir David,” said Shuckburgh, commenting on the proposal in a statement.

“In assessing such ideas we need to explore all aspects, including the technological advances required, the potential unintended consequences and side effects, the costs, the rules and regulations that would be needed, as well as the public acceptability.”