Ars Technica:
Apple’s solution to shaving thickness from the Retina MacBook Pro—gluing its lithium polymer battery cells directly to the aluminum unibody shell—continues to spark debate among proponents of sustainable electronics.
Apple submitted the device to the Green Electronics Council for an EPEAT Gold rating last week, prompting critics to argue that the glued-in battery should disqualify it from any rating at all. But it turns out that some recyclers disagree, saying it isn’t dramatically more difficult to safely remove the battery than in other modern devices.
Muddying the waters further is Apple itself.
This is The Story That Won’t Die.
I just don’t get it. Apple will recycle all of their computers for free. End of story. Any story beyond that is just a pissing match and farts in the wind.
Perhaps but the EPEAT ratings may cause Apple to lose sales. In that regard, they are important.
Apple doesn’t recycle itself.
They outsource it to third party company.
Absolutely irrelevant. You give your Mac to Apple, they recycle it for free. End of story. Whether they do it themselves or contract it to someone else is completely irrelevant.
Precisely why EPEAT itself is retarded. Who the hell cares how “difficult” it is to recycle a product if the manufacturer will shoulder all the costs and do it for free? EPEAT should be concerned with eliminating toxic materials and encouraging the use of green materials & energy efficiency.
Worrying about the difficulty of taking a product apart for recycling is just farts in the wind enacted as government policy.
relevance is that other companies are doing the same thing
but that didn’t stop certain recyclers to ship
their computers to third world countries and dump
them in open land fills.
Whether Apple can control their recyclers who just the
same as the rest is the question.
Seems to me that greater difficulty with actually recycling something might determine whether a recycler cuts corners to save on processing costs.
It strikes me that headline isn’t correct — the two recyclers quoted both had no particular problems or concerns with the Retina MacBook.
The people who have concerns are an activist and a guy whose website makes money from people fixing their own Macs. Wouldn’t that count as two people with an agenda?
The headline is fine. It’s saying that recyclers disagree with the assertion that the devices are too difficult to recycle, not that they’re disagreeing with each other.
I take your point, but the headline can be read two different ways (and in fairness, that’s not Loop’s fault, that’s Ars headline) — 1. recyclers disagree amongst themselves, and 2. recyclers differ with critics.
Not a big deal, really. I read it as #1. But I think a lot of others might as well.