2.1
January 27, 2010

Is the iPad green-ish?

The iPad, savior of media, is green!

(Within the context of toxic consumption-happy electronics, that is).

You can read anything, comfortably, on it. Goodbye Kindle. You can sit on it. You can drop it. You can unlock it. You can attach a keyboard to it. But will it !@#$%^ us up?

If the iPad kills the book, is it green? Not if said books come from managed forests, are FSC-certified, with recycled content…tree farms can absorb far more carbon than toxic electronics, of course.

You can skip this funny-silly video, keep reading below. Video via @Ecorazzi + @mubex:

The Apple Ipad for Women

New gadgetry is, by definition, awful for our health and that of our planet. It encourages us to throw away whatever we used to use and/or buy new stuff—and that stuff is rarely recycled, full of intricate components, and said components are generally about as toxic as a jar of poison.

Still, Apple has gone to great lengths in recent years to minimize the negative impact of their laptops, etc., leading much of the industry in getting eco-responsible. We’ve covered their efforts from time to time, time and time again.

Steve Jobs’ new “revolutionary,” “impressive,” “remarkable” (his words) iPad is the great tech hope for old media—papers like NY Times will get to charge for suddenly highly readable content, the kind of content most of us ignore in paper form, these days, and most of us ignore on our too-small-to-read for long Blackberries and iPhones. So that’s good.

But the iPad is also green. Well, green-ish. Well, greener than it might have been. It still represents consumption at its grandest—and all of what we’re making now will be tossed within just a few years. That said, it’s got some claims to eco-responsible fame:

Via Greenbiz:

At the start of the event, Jobs ran down the green creds of the gizmo: In keeping with Apple’s environmental policies, the device is free of all kinds of nasty chemicals. It is arsenic-free, mercury-free, BFR-free, PVC-free, and, according to this slide, taken by the good folks (and great livebloggers) at Engadget, “highly recyclable.”…

…Jobs also stated that the iPad can get 10 hours of battery life — an impressive feat if it’s true. (For comparison’s sake, my brand-new MacBook Pro supposedly gets 7 hours of battery life and in reality gets around 4, unless I turn the display to near-dark and stick to processor-light tasks.)…

…First and foremost, the production of electronics has a huge environmental impact. Precious and rare metals to build the gadgets, global supply chains to bring those materials to manufacturers (and bring those gadgets to market), and the energy used during their lifetime are the beginning of the problem.

There is also the huge problem of end-of-life management for these gadgets. Electronics recycling is at best a nascent market — as we write about all the time on GreenerComputing, and which we find in our annual State of Green Business report. At worst, we’re throwing away far more gadgets than we should be, and neither manufacturers, retailers or governments have yet put in place a good way to collect even a fraction of what’s discarded.

But the biggest problem to my way of thinking is that the tablet will just be an addition, not a replacement.…for the rest, and it’s worth it, click here.

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