Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon are all locked in a race to see who can zero out their carbon pollution first.
Apple reported on Wednesday that it is more than halfway there. Since 2015, the company says it has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by around 60%. That covers everything from manufacturing and marketing to corporate operations and customer use.
Many companies have successfully eliminated the carbon footprint of their core operations. Cheap solar and wind, and increasingly affordable grid-scale batteries, have made that relatively simple — and even advantageous — from a cost perspective.
But Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have all pledged to eliminate not just their own carbon emissions, but also those of their suppliers and the energy use of their customers. These so-called Scope 3 emissions are the hardest to tackle because they fall outside of a company’s direct control.
In that regard, Apple has taken some pioneering steps. When the company announced the Apple Watch Series 9, it also said that it would be buying renewable power on behalf of its customers. A year later, it did the same for buyers of the new M4 Mac mini.
The Mac mini announcement also inadvertently highlighted the outsize role that semiconductors play in the carbon footprint of electronic goods.
The base model Mac mini with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage generates 32 kg of carbon pollution over its lifetime, while the top spec version, which has 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, carries a footprint of 121 kg. The greater number of chips is largely responsible for nearly quadrupling the figure.
Apple said on Wednesday that it has been working with its semiconductor suppliers to address the issue, with 26 of them having already pledged to abate at least 90% of fluorinated greenhouse gases in their operations. Fluorinated greenhouse gases are widely used in semiconductor manufacturing today for etching features into chips and cleaning the equipment. But fluorinated compounds are some of the most potent greenhouse gases. For example, hexafluoroethane generates 9,200 times as much warming as an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide.
Apple is aiming to eliminate at least 75% of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, which means it’s well over halfway to its target, with five years remaining. The company has said that it will offset the remaining 25% through carbon-removal programs.
That’s similar to how other companies are tackling the hardest emissions to abate, though they differ in their details. Microsoft, for example, is investing in technological solutions like direct air capture alongside nature-based solutions like reforestation. Apple has decided that nature-based solutions offer the best chance at reducing emissions in the near term.
