Submitted: The Two Sides Team November 22, 2012

Everything Apple does makes headlines.
October 24 2012

by Matthew Wheeland, GreenBiz

Everything Apple does makes headlines.

That statement, of course, is about as unsurprising as can be. The once-scrappy underdog from Cupertino, Calif. — now the country’s most valuable company, ever — has long made tidal-sized waves with its innovative products, its visionary founder and the strength of its reality distortion field.

Love it or hate it, Apple inspires strong feelings.

The past three months have shown in new ways how those feelings apply to Apple’s sustainability efforts. In brief: In July Apple abruptly abandoned EPEAT. Uproar ensued. Apple abruptly reversed course. Sustainability-minded folks crowed.

Then, Apple released new hardware, including a MacBook Pro that
included glued-in batteries, not-upgradeable RAM and disk drives, and a
“completely fused” display, according to a teardown from iFixit, which earned Apple the lowest possible score for repairability.

More uproar ensued. EPEAT investigated, determining that the MacBook
Pro and four other devices from Lenovo, Samsung and Toshiba met the EPEAT standard. Critics roared.

The story has made the rounds of several news cycles, generally
traveling along the lines of “EPEAT caved to Apple on MacBook Pro” —
led by a Wired op-ed by iFixit’s CEO in the wake of EPEAT’s announcement and iFixit’s damning review of the new MacBook Pro.

I will admit to being skeptical when the news came out about the
MacBook Pro staying in the EPEAT registry: I’d read the iFixit teardown
with concern, and wondered if any organization could withstand the full
force of the reality distortion field. To get a look behind the scenes
of the dustup, I spoke at length last week with EPEAT’s director of
communications, Sarah O’Brien.

One takeaway O’Brien really clarified for me was that there isn’t a
way to change the standard quickly — the EPEAT standard for computers
and displays itself is six years old. Although underway, work on
updating the standard will likely take a year or more to wrap up,
according to O’Brien. EPEAT’s role then is a policing function, to make
sure that products on the registry belong there, and clarifying what the
language of the IEEE 1680.1 standard (a.k.a. EPEAT) means.

“We don’t have a lot of leeway in how we interpret,” O’Brien said.
“We do our very best to find empirical ways [to verify the language].
All of our verifications are independent so we can’t influence them, so
if you’re asking a question of what’s easy — and that’s the word that
stakeholders have left us to work with — then that’s what we have to
work with.”

In the case of the ultrathin laptops, EPEAT began the process to
verify the appropriateness of these five product lines to stay in the
registry based on concerns about disassembly and upgradeability. This
meant a top-level search of the registry for thin and light computers,
then a winnowing-down of devices on the list, and then doing a detailed
analysis is conducted by a nonaffiliated third party.

That analysis raised a few questions, which were then answered in
what’s called a “clarification” of the language in the standard — and
which is publicly available (if a bit obliquely worded) on the EPEAT website.

The hubbub? Largely whether, based on the iFixit teardown of the
MacBook Pro, is the product easily disassembled? And just what does
“easy” mean?

The bulk of the clarification deals quite granularly with the
following criterion (which is one of 28 required criteria — if any of
these laptops didn’t meet it, they’d be out of the registry — so it’s
big stakes):

Criterion 4.3.1.3 — Required — Easy disassembly of external enclosure.


Product criterion: External enclosures shall be easily removable by one person alone with commonly available tools.

In the verification process, the product verification committee (PVC)
unpacked each element of that language — what is an “external
enclosure”? What does “easily removable” mean? What constitutes
“commonly available tools”? — in an effort to develop some concrete
guidance for manufacturers to follow when designing products to meet
EPEAT standards.

The findings of the PVC basically state that:

• 
  An external enclosure protects internal parts; the language in the
  standard ties in to another subsection of the design for end-of-life
  criterion that requires hazardous materials to be easily identified and
  removed.
• 
  “Easily removable” means that companies must demonstrate that
  enclosures are easily removable, and importantly that: “the design does
  not unreasonabl[y] obstruct the disassembly process.”
• 
  “Commonly available tools” are those that anyone can buy easily and
  with no restrictions “on the open market” — so online or in a store.
  (Take that, MacBook Pro proprietary pentalobe screwdriver!)

In less wonky terms, the clarifications suggest that this whole
tempest has been somewhat teapot-sized: Professional e-waste recyclers
can still do their jobs, and computer owners can still upgrade devices
if they’re so motivated.

An interesting side note to emerge from this process: in clarifying
the meaning of “external enclosure” in this standard, the PVC brought in
definitions from the just-released EPEAT standards for imaging
equipment and televisions. This marks the first time that language from
the new standards can actually serve to upgrade the rapidly aging
original EPEAT standard.

So what caused the hubbub? I’d chalk it up to a few key factors:

1. 
   The prominence of EPEAT in the institutional purchasing marketplace.
2. 
   A growing awareness of and concern about green IT in general and e-waste in particular.
3. 
   And most importantly, Apple’s role in this story.

Trying to guess what drives decisions inside Apple is a losing
proposition, but something O’Brien said during our conversation —
unrelated to Apple — got me thinking. Normally in the course of a
verification, if a product passes verification (as all five of these
products did) there’s no report or publication; business continues as
usual. It’s only when a product fails verification that anything gets
publicized (usually; in this case EPEAT did publicize that the products
passed).

So perhaps the original act in this drama — Apple abandoning EPEAT
— was actually a pre-emptive strike (or a pre-emptive breakup)? Knowing
the direction they were moving in with their laptops, perhaps company
leaders assumed that they’d not meet the mandatory disassembly criteria
and pulled the MacBook Pro out of the registry before it could be
publicized that they failed.

In other words, perhaps they were hoping to avoid just the same
kerfluffle that they’ve been embroiled in for the past three months.

If so, whoops.

Regardless of the drivers of this dustup, in the end I think the
biggest lessons are that EPEAT carries a lot of weight in the IT world,
and that the computer-using public also cares about green IT (even if in
this case that care took the shape of a stick with which to beat
Apple).

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