Chapter 8: Supply Chain Management{0}
How Green Is Apple: Cleaning the Supply Chain
This article relates to an unusual aspect of supply chain management: the environment and guilt by association. Apple is the main company being discussed here, but essentially all major computer manufacturers (Original Equipment Manufacturers, OEM) outsource the physical construction of their systems. Like Dell in the chapter’s case example, most of Apple’s suppliers are in Taiwan and/or China, which can make it expensive and difficult to ensure that conditions and product quality are up to the standards of Apple’s policies.
As a group, OEMs often come under fire due to the environmental impact of improperly discarded electronics equipment. Everything from monitors to motherboards can be seriously damaging to the environment, due to the materials released as the item breaks down and the sheer length of time it can take plastics and silicon to break down into natural compounds.
Apple was rated ahead of major competitors Dell and HP, because it’s making a visible effort to reduce or eliminate particularly harmful compounds, like PVCs, from its products, a move environmental watchdog groups support. However, these groups are also interested in the environmental impact of Apple’s own corporate operations, data that Apple execs have been keeping under their hats. This information includes things like a greenhouse gas inventory, fossil fuel use, and waste recycling.
The article ends by saying Apple does in fact release most of the information the watchdog groups want, if not in the same way they’d like it (cough, easy to read, cough), and questions how recent their studies are. So perhaps Apple is cleaning up all over!
Bertolucci, Jeff. “How Green is Apple: Cleaning the Supply Chain” Macworld.com, April 22nd, 2009. (Mac Publishing LLC, 2009). Retrieved from http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/163608/how_green_is_apple_cleaning_the_supply_chain.html on Oct. 15th, 2009.