Climate Change

We don’t want to debate climate change. We want to stop it.

Our solar plant in Yerington, Nevada, generates up to 20 megawatts of renewable energy for our Reno data center.

It takes an enormous amount of energy to design, assemble, and ship hundreds of millions of products all over the world. That energy makes up our carbon footprint and in turn, our share of the climate change problem. We’ve made real progress in reducing the impact of the things we control directly — our offices, retail stores, and products. But there’s still a lot of work to be done to reduce the carbon footprint of our supply chain. And it’s our responsibility to lead that effort.

Why we measure our carbon footprint so rigorously.

We take a thorough approach to measuring and taking responsibility for our environmental impact. In fact, we know of no other company in our industry that goes so far in measuring, verifying, and disclosing its carbon emissions. Instead of reporting just the carbon footprint of the facilities we own, we also include the carbon footprint of our supply chain. And we don’t use generalized industry-standard measurement models — we use a comprehensive product life cycle analysis that measures the carbon footprint throughout the entire life of our products, so everything is meticulously accounted for. That means adding up emissions generated from the manufacturing, transportation, use, and recycling of our products, as well as emissions generated by all our facilities. And while we’re constantly improving, we’re also constantly reporting — even when our numbers aren’t as good as we’d like them to be.

We’re proud to have signed the CERES Climate Declaration, which recognizes the business challenges and opportunities of fighting climate change.

Our 2014 carbon footprint

0metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions
  • 0.4M
    Facilities*
  • 7.0M
    Product Use
  • 1.6M
    Transportation
  • 0.5M
    Recycling
  • 24.8M
    Manufacturing
Climate change affects us all. We’ve made a big impact in our own facilities, and now we’re tackling the global supply chain.
Lisa JacksonVP of Environmental Initiatives, Apple,at our Maiden, North Carolina, solar farm.

How our carbon footprint informs our thinking.

We’re always trying to improve the way we conduct our greenhouse gas life cycle analysis. And when our assessments reveal a material, process, or system that’s making a significant negative impact on our carbon footprint, we reexamine how we design that product, process, or facility.

A significant factor in the increase of our overall carbon footprint from 2013 to 2014 is simply that we sold more products than ever before — iPhone, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air in particular. Even though the quantity of the products we make is increasing, we are reducing the carbon intensity associated with making and using them. The ratio of carbon emissions to the revenue we generate has dropped steadily every year since 2008.

From 2013 to 2014, we saw a 7 percent decline in emissions associated with product use thanks to improved energy efficiency of our products. In the same period, there was a 5 percent increase in manufacturing emissions attributed to the production needs of increased memory and storage capacity of our iOS devices and notebooks.

Our data shows that the carbon footprint of our manufacturing processes represents the largest portion of our impact on climate change. Every year we investigate more deeply into our supply chain, constantly analyzing inefficiencies and developing ways to help our suppliers make less of an impact on the planet. We’ve set an example with our own facilities around the world using clean, renewable energy. Our work in helping our suppliers do the same is just beginning, but we’re making strides. And we’re committed to reducing the environmental impact of our manufacturing.

The Apple Store, Fifth Avenue, is one of our 265 U.S. retail stores that run on 100 percent renewable energy.

An energy-efficient facility is good, but a 100 percent renewable energy facility is better.

As of 2014, 100 percent of our U.S. operations and 87 percent of our operations worldwide are powered by renewable energy — which results in fewer carbon emissions. These worldwide operations include a lot — all our data centers; all our corporate offices, which house nearly 50,000 employees; and over 450 Apple Retail Stores around the world — but our goal is to power all of them with 100 percent renewable energy. So we’re tapping into energy from solar, wind, micro‑hydro, biogas fuel cells, and geothermal sources. We’re designing new buildings and updating existing ones to use as little electricity as possible. And we’re investing in our own Apple onsite energy production as well as establishing relationships with third‑party energy suppliers to source renewable energy. Learn more about our commitment to renewable energy

2014
87%
2010
16%
We’ve more than quintupled the use of renewable energy at Apple corporate, retail, and data facilities worldwide.

We can make better products with cleaner practices.

Our dedication to an environmentally sustainable operation goes beyond our corporate offices and retail stores. We look for every opportunity to develop cleaner manufacturing processes that help us create not only great products, but also a better environment. We may not own our suppliers’ facilities, but we do own their carbon footprint. And we’d like to see the same progress in our suppliers’ use of clean energy that we’ve seen in our own.

For example, we worked with our supplier Flextronics to identify energy savings in the Austin, Texas, facility where they manufacture Mac Pro. Flextronics then shifted its entire Mac Pro operations to 100 percent renewable wind energy, purchased from the same local utility that provides our Austin campus with 100 percent renewable energy. And we’re encouraging our other suppliers to follow Flextronics’ lead and move toward clean energy.

We’re also helping our suppliers in China pave the way for renewable energy. Our 40‑megawatt solar project near Chengdu, designed to power our corporate offices and retail stores, is setting a precedent for large‑scale renewable energy in China. By showing that green energy is a viable option in China, we hope to set a clear path for the companies there that manufacture our products.

Wind turbines in Texas generate renewable power for Flextronics, our supplier that manufactures Mac Pro.

Energy efficiency is built in.

The energy consumed by our products during everyday use represents a big share of our carbon footprint. So we look at three ways to reduce a product’s energy consumption: more efficient power supplies to bring electricity from the wall to the device, more efficient hardware, and smarter power management software.

As a company that designs both the hardware and the software for its products, we’re able to use that technological collaboration for greater energy efficiency. OS X, the Mac operating system, never misses a power-saving opportunity, no matter how small. It puts hard disks to sleep and runs processors in an ultralow power mode when you’re not hard at work on your Mac. And when you are, OS X uses less energy for apps that are open but not visible, pauses animated website plug‑ins until you give the OK, and can even idle the processor between keystrokes as you type. These energy savings might seem tiny, but when multiplied by every Apple computer in the world, they’re huge.

A lot of the things that used to be done on a computer are now being done on an iPad or iPhone. Since these smaller devices use a lot less material and energy, their carbon footprint is much smaller than that of a computer. And as these devices become more and more advanced, their performance improves right along with their energy efficiency. For example, the A8 chip delivers up to 25 percent faster CPU performance and up to 50 percent faster graphics performance, yet it’s 50 percent more energy efficient.

Thanks to improvements in energy efficiency, our products generate an average of 61 percent fewer greenhouse gas emissions during the use phase than in 2008. So even as we continue to grow faster than the rest of the industry, we’re doing it with products that are friendlier to the environment.

Timer Coalescing lets a Mac use less energy by grouping operations together, reducing CPU activity up to 72 percent.
ENERGY STAR standards are just our starting point.

Every Apple product not only meets but far exceeds the strict guidelines set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for energy efficiency. No other company in our industry can make that claim. In fact, we go beyond the ENERGY STAR specification, offering notebooks that are up to five times as energy efficient as the ENERGY STAR specification and desktop computers that are up to seven times as energy efficient.5

The EPEAT gold standard.

The Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool (EPEAT) allows consumers to see the effect a product has on the environment. Each product receives a Gold, Silver, or Bronze rank depending on its efficiency and sustainability. Every Apple tablet, notebook, desktop computer, and display that EPEAT ranks achieves a Gold rating, the highest possible.

See the environmental performance report for every product we make