In a recent report by Greenpeace, Apple’s reliance on highly polluting coal power at its data centers that house its servers has given the company the title of being “least green.”
As the guardian reports, Greenpeace recently reported that Apple is the least green tech company when compared to other giants like Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, and HP. Apparently, Apple reached this ‘honor’ by relying on the use of coal power to power its data centers.
The report estimated dependence on coal for Apple’s data centres at 54.5%. This means that Apple is ‘least green’ and should use ‘cleaner energy sources’ to power its data centers.
Greenpeace’s IT policy analyst, Gary Cook, said, “Consumers want to know that when they upload a video or change their Facebook status that they are not contributing to global warming or future Fukushimas. Many companies treat their energy consumption a bit like the Coca-Cola secret formula, because they don’t want competitors knowing how much they spend on energy. The amount of electricity they consume would give some indication of what kind of arms race they were in. They don’t really want this story to be told.”
Just recently, we learned that Apple was working on a new data center in North Carolina, USA. To give you an idea of how much electricity this data center will be using, just think of a neighborhood of 80,000 average US homes using electricity for everyday usage. That’s how much power will be used for this data center alone.
We also learned recently that Apple has earned a total of 24.6 billion dollars as of March 2011. 50% of that revenue came from iPhone sales.
Apple is also involved in an ongoing lawsuit with Samsung claiming that the company has copied its iPad and iPhone designs.
Apple, of course, declined to comment on the Greenpeace report.
Further reading: Apple
