A history of progress.
For more than 20 years, Apple has been working on ways to minimise the impact our company and our products have on the environment. We developed and formulated our first environmental policy in 1990, and every year since then, we’ve continued to make our products more energy efficient, eliminated many toxic substances and embraced renewable energy in our facilities. In 2009, we became the first company in our industry to report comprehensive calculations of our total carbon footprint — including environmental reports for every product — giving the public an opportunity to judge our efforts and track our progress in detail.
Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina, data centre.
Our new data centre in Maiden, North Carolina, demonstrates our commitment to reducing the environmental impact of our facilities through energy-efficient, green building design. The facility has earned the coveted LEED Platinum certification from the US Green Building Council. We know of no other data centre of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification. Apple’s goal is to run the Maiden facility with a high percentage renewable energy mix and we have major projects underway to achieve this — including building the nation’s largest end user-owned solar array and building the largest non-utility fuel cell installation in the United States.
Energy-efficient design elements of the Maiden facility include:
- A chilled water storage system to improve chiller efficiency by transferring 10,400 kWh of electricity consumption from peak to off-peak hours each day
- Use of “free” outside air cooling through a water-side economiser operation during night-time and cool-weather hours which, along with water storage, allows the chillers to be turned off more than 75 per cent of the time
- Extreme precision in managing cooling distribution for cold air containment pods with variable-speed fans controlled to exactly match air flow to server requirements from moment to moment
- Power distributed at higher voltages, which increases efficiency by reducing power loss
- White cool-roof design to provide maximum solar reflectivity
- High-efficiency LED lighting combined with motion sensors
- Real-time power monitoring and analytics during operations
- Construction processes that utilised 14 per cent recycled materials, diverted 93 per cent of construction waste from landfill and sourced 41 per cent of purchased materials from within 800 kilometres of the site
Reducing environmental impact via digital consumption.
Through iTunes, the App Store and iCloud, Apple has dramatically changed the traditional consumption model of CDs, DVDs and DVD-ROMs associated with music, films and data storage. With the introduction of the iBookstore and Newsstand, Apple has also revolutionised how people purchase and consume books, magazines and newspapers. We estimate that a reader who uses the iPad for reading has half the environmental impact of a reader who purchases paperback books.*
