Greenpeace has produced a fake Apple site that berates the company for its failure to do more to protect the environment. It says: "A cutting edge company shouldn't be cutting lives short by exposing children in China and India to dangerous chemicals."
This is an area where Dell, on Greenpeace's evaluation, is the leading green PC manufacturer.
Apple has previously been targeted by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, which produced an unApple brochure (PDF) as part the Computertakeback campaign.
And according to research "conducted by an independent Danish laboratory," reported in ZD Net last week, "HP and Apple have come top in an investigation into the levels of toxic chemicals used in the production of market-leading laptops."
Apple's new MacBook range was also criticised by the environmental researchers for the high amounts of a toxic flame retardant, tetrabromobisphenol. Greenpeace acknowledged that Apple has stated it is looking for alternatives to the substance but said that right now it is using far higher amounts of the chemical than competitors.
Comment: Apple paints a glowing picture of its environmental efforts, and gets widespread support from the Mac press, which is still in the denial phase. Sure, you can make excuses. There are plenty of other people to point fingers at. But a company that spends gazillions on marketing itself as "cool" and has Al Gore on its board should be leading the way on environmental issues, and Apple isn't.
