Climate Change

Climate change is real. So is what we’re doing about it.

Carbon Footprint

A more complex carbon footprint requires more inventive solutions.

When we measure our carbon footprint, we include hundreds of suppliers, millions of customers, and hundreds of millions of devices. And we’re always looking for ways to make the biggest difference in five major areas: manufacturing, product use, facilities, transportation, and recycling.

We design each generation of our products to be as energy efficient as possible. We’re sourcing lower-carbon materials to make our devices, and we’re partnering with suppliers to add clean energy to their facilities. We produce and procure clean, renewable energy to power 93 percent of our offices, retail stores, and data centers around the world, which has lowered emissions from our facilities to 1 percent of our comprehensive carbon footprint. We’re also adjusting our recycling practices and rethinking our shipping strategies.

93%
Currently, 93 percent of our facilities worldwide run on renewable energy.
Carbon Emissions per Product (kg)
Year Carbon Emissions (kg)
2010 131.2
2011 137.2
2012 126.7
2013 124.1
2014 122.1
2015 114.1
Carbon emissions per product (kg)
We’ve decreased carbon emissions per product every year since 2011.

Our comprehensive 2015 carbon footprint

38,400,000

metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions

  • 77% Manufacturing
  • 17% Product Usage
  • 1% Facilities
  • 4% Transportation
  • 1% Recycling

Manufacturing

Manufacturing a smaller footprint.

How we make our products is the largest piece of our carbon footprint. We’ve identified two areas where we can dramatically reduce our impact: raw materials production and electricity used in manufacturing.

Partnering with suppliers for clean energy.

The electricity we use in our supply chain to process raw materials, make parts, and assemble our products is the single biggest source of our carbon footprint. So in 2015, we created a program to help our partners around the world reduce their energy use, power their facilities with clean energy, and build high-quality renewable energy projects. We’re building 200 megawatts of solar in China, starting with a 170-megawatt solar project in Inner Mongolia, to begin offsetting our manufacturing emissions. We’re also working with suppliers to install more than 4 gigawatts of new clean energy worldwide, including 2 gigawatts in China by 2020. And over the next two years, Foxconn will install 400 megawatts of solar to cover the energy use of its iPhone final production facility in Zhengzhou.

Our 4 gigawatts of clean energy projects around the world will avoid more than 30 million metric tons of carbon pollution by 2020. That’s the equivalent of taking more than 6 million cars off the road for one year.

Lowering our carbon emissions by focusing on aluminum.

We sell millions and millions of phones. So making even small adjustments to the production of iPhone can have a big impact. We discovered that changing how we make the aluminum enclosure could lower our carbon footprint. We prioritized aluminum that was smelted using hydroelectricity rather than fossil fuels. And we reengineered our manufacturing process to reincorporate the scrap aluminum. As a result, we cut the carbon footprint associated with the aluminum enclosure of iPhone 6s in half compared with the previous generation. And we’re looking for new ways to use more carbon-efficient aluminum across all our products.

iPhone 6
iPhone 6s
The carbon footprint of the iPhone 6s aluminum enclosure is half that of the previous generation.

Product Usage

Your energy use is our energy use.

All the energy it takes to run your device — from the time you open the box to the day it’s recycled — is added to our carbon footprint. We even include the energy it takes to charge your device, which usually comes from carbon-intensive sources such as coal or gas. So we’re always developing new ways to make our products as efficient as possible. For example, the Mac operating system puts the hard drive to sleep and runs processors in an ultralow power mode when you’re not hard at work. It can even save energy when the screen is static and between keystrokes when you type.

MacBook Air consumes 52 percent less energy than the original model. Mac mini consumes 40 percent less power when idle than the previous generation. Apple TV consumes 90 percent less energy than the first generation. And you can charge your iPhone 6s once a day for a year for only 53 cents. In fact, since 2008 we’ve reduced the average total power consumed by Apple products by 64 percent, bringing down our overall carbon footprint and your electricity bill at the same time.1

Go ahead, ask Siri all the questions you want.

Every time you send an iMessage, make a FaceTime call, ask Siri a question, download a song, or share a photo, it takes energy. And we hold ourselves responsible for that energy, not you. We’re proud to say that all those tasks are handled by Apple data servers running on 100 percent renewable energy. When we need a little extra juice, we work with third-party data centers. Even though we don’t own them, and share them with other companies, we still include them in our renewable energy goals. So we’re working with these providers to get them to 100 percent renewable energy, too. All told, in 2014 our data centers avoided 150,000 metric tons of CO2e emissions. And in 2015, that number grew to 187,000 metric tons.

Facilities

We use the power of the sun, wind, and water to power our lights, servers, and coffeemakers.

We’re constantly working toward our goal of covering 100 percent of the electricity use of our global facilities — our offices, retail stores, and data centers — with 100 percent renewable energy. As of January 2016, we’re at 93 percent worldwide. And in 23 countries, including the United States, the UK, China, and Australia, we’re at 100 percent. For example, we connected 40 megawatts of new solar energy to China’s national grid, producing more than enough electricity for all of Apple’s offices and retail stores in China.

In 2015, by using renewable energy in Apple facilities, we avoided 335,000 metric tons of CO2e emissions from entering the atmosphere, the equivalent of almost 360,000,000 pounds of coal not burned.4

1.5 billion
In February 2016, we issued a US$1.5 billion green bond dedicated to financing environmental projects, including renewable energy initiatives at our facilities and with our suppliers around the world.

Innovating on rooftops in Singapore.

Singapore is so densely populated that there’s no space on the ground for a large-scale solar project. So we designed an entirely new solution. We worked with local renewable energy provider Sunseap to source clean energy from roughly 32 megawatts of solar panels on more than 800 rooftops in the city. This first-of-its-kind project will produce enough energy to run all our Singapore offices and our part of the shared data center that we use for extra computing capacity.

Home green home.

The new Apple campus in Cupertino will be the most energy-efficient building of its kind. We’re recycling or reusing more than 95 percent of the material from the demolished buildings at the site by finding ways to repurpose virtually every piece of concrete, glass, and metal.

The building will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy, primarily generated by one of the largest onsite corporate solar energy installations in the world. And air will flow freely between the inside and outside of the building, providing natural ventilation for 75 percent of the year.

8000
The site will be populated by over 8000 trees, including more than 7000 newly planted shade and fruit trees.
100%
Apple Campus 2 will be powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

Transportation

Reducing our carbon emissions by air and sea.

Transporting hundreds of millions of products uses a lot of energy. Our logistics team is focused on reducing our carbon footprint in this area. That includes looking for opportunities to make air and ocean shipping more efficient so they use less fuel. And because we’re working to make our devices lighter and the packaging smaller, we’re cutting down on emissions no matter how our products are delivered.

We’re participating in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s SmartWay Program to find more ways to improve fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases and air pollution from the transportation supply chain industry.

Recycling

Recycling counts toward our footprint, too.

Unlike many of our competitors, we include all the energy used to recycle our products in our carbon footprint. So whenever possible, we recycle our products in the region where they’re collected, reducing the carbon emissions associated with shipping. When we have to ship, we do it responsibly. Because we work closely with all our recyclers and with vetted facilities, nothing is dumped unsafely in developing countries, which is a common problem in our industry.

Recycling is also good for reducing global carbon emissions. Fewer carbon emissions are created by recycling materials such as aluminum than by mining and smelting new materials. Whoever uses the recycled material can count the carbon savings against their footprint, so we don’t double-count it against ours.