On September 12, Apple declared its new Apple Watch to be carbon neutral. It did so with a powerful and quite acclaimed video in terms of corporate and environmental communication. A five minutes long message in which Mother Nature, played by actress Octavia Spencer, scrupulously evaluates all the multinational corporation's green initiatives.

From renewable energy to carbon offsetting in South America, a succession of extraordinary achievements culminating in the launch of the first Apple Watch with a zero emissions record. “By 2030, all of our products will be carbon neutral,” CEO Tim Cook earnestly promises Mother Nature, who leaves the Cupertino offices in California with satisfaction.

The accusation of climate-washing

All of this sounds very nice. Except that a report released on September 22 by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), an influential nonprofit organization based in Beijing, rated the new watch's carbon neutrality claim as “climate-washing.” The iPhone manufacturer had previously praised IPE as a leader in environmental research, which is dedicated to collecting, collating and analyzing corporate environmental data and has been evaluating the environmental performance of its manufacturing plants in China for more than a decade.

The mutual respect, however, has not affected the institute's meticulous environmental assessments, which, in no uncertain terms, accused Apple of not providing enough information on their supply chains' emissions.

Apple's response

In response to the report, Apple said the carbon-neutrality of its Apple Watch line was independently verified by SCS Global Services, a global environmental standards and certification company.  “By far, the most impactful action a supplier can take to address climate change is to transition to renewable energy,” Apple said in a written statement. “That’s why we work closely with suppliers to help them procure more renewables and advocate together for reliable, cost-effective access to clean electricity in grids around the world.”

Missing data from the supply chain

The IPE's analysis confirms that in 2023 fewer than 30 of Apple's suppliers disclosed data to the IPE on greenhouse gas emissions from production facilities, when in previous years there were more than 100. As Inside Climate News points out, the institute had already reprimanded Apple in 2011 for not disclosing information about its suppliers and the pollution they were producing from their operations.

As a result of IPE's investigations, the multinational company has committed to disclosing more and more data, so much so that in 2019 it was the first among more than 400 companies with manufacturing suppliers in China to receive IPE's “Master” title for outstanding supply chain performance in terms of sustainability and transparency.

“In many years of our index assessment, Apple was one of the top performers, so we did give it credit for that, but when it started making the claim of a carbon neutral product, that is a very high standard and I think it needs an even higher level of disclosure,” Ma Jun, director of the IPE, stated last week.

Concerns about renewable energy used by Apple

Another question mark posed by IPE concerns the fact that 24 percent of the renewable energy currently claimed in Apple's supply chain comes from energy certificates rather than direct renewable energy use. The doubts about these certificates are not insignificant. According to a 2022 study published in the journal Nature, they do not encourage concrete decarbonization actions and “threaten the integrity” of the company's emissions reduction goals.

Moreover, according to the reconstruction, since emissions from iPhones have suddenly increased – as Apple itself has revealed – there's a plausible suspicion that the company has been allocating less renewable energy to iPhones in order to allocate it to their new watches. In the statement, however, Apple retorts that they never reallocated renewable energy from the production of iPhones or other products to the Apple Watch. They also added that greenhouse gas emissions from the new iPhone 15 Pro are 28 percent lower than the 2015 baseline, precisely because of the amount of renewable energy used by suppliers.

For several corporations like Apple, launching carbon neutral products has become almost an obsessive competition. But the higher they raise their ambitions, the greater the risk of going the extra mile and ending up hit by a boomerang called greenwashing.

This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano

Image: a frameshot from Apple’s video