Apple is putting a lot of emphasis on its “green” initiatives lately. But is it the real deal?

For example, Apple’s new energy efficiency page says that because 53 percent of Apple’s greenhouse gas emissions are a result of the power its products consume, it’s designing these products to be as energy efficient as possible employing three strategies to reduce energy consumption: more efficient power supplies, components that require less power, and power management software. Every new Mac is claimed to meet the strict low-power requirements of the Energy Star specification.

However, the operative questions are how much does “green computing” matter to consumers, and whether corporate marketing of “green” IT devices amounts to more image-spinning than substance.

Only the Bare Minimum?

Some critics, such as MacNewsWorld’s Rob Enderle accuse Apple of doing the “barest minimum necessary” to justify its “green” claims — indeed less than its major competitors, but viewed pragmatically that’s a sensible approach because based on his research into the matter, in Enderle’s view Apple’s customers mostly don’t care. Is that an accurate assessment, or exaggeratedly jaundiced? After all, environmentalist poster boy Al Gore sits on Apple’s board of directors.

Enderle claims that Apple tried to ignore green computing entirely until the eco-activist organization Greenpeace began relentlessly slagging the company as an environmental foot-dragger and laggard.

Addressing Apple’s Environmental Footprint

Apple’s website highlights several key areas in which it’s addressing its environmental footprint, citing engineering innovations such as the unibody MacBooks, whose light, fully recyclable housing is sculpted from a single billet of aluminum, and the lightness of the current iMacs which contain less than 20 pounds of materials.

Apple also claims to be at the industry forefront in eliminating toxic chemicals, such as arsenic, brominated flame retardants (BFRs), mercury, phthalates, and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) from its products.

Cupertino has reduced packaging bulk, and, somewhat questionably in my view, bundles fewer peripherals with its systems, which arguably has some minimal environmental benefit, but also saves Apple a fair bit of money while diminishing value to the consumer of what is a premium-priced product.

Diminishing Value for Minimal Environmental Benefit

For example, the new WallStreet PowerBook I bought in 1999 came with video, Ethernet, and modem cables and a decent hard copy manual. To connect the unibody MacBook I bought this year to an external monitor I need one of several varieties of Mini DisplayPort adapters, have to supply my own Ethernet cable, was obliged to buy a USB modem, and documentation amounted to a quick start pamphlet. Environmental sensibilities notwithstanding, I don’t perceive this as progress.

Apple’s claims of cleaning up its environmental footprint act do have substance in terms of operational energy consumption. One reason using laptops has long appealed to me is that because they must be able to operate on battery power, they’re engineered for energy efficiency. However, even Apple’s mass market desktops have very decent energy consumption profiles these days, with iMacs reportedly using about as much energy as a 60-watt lightbulb, and Mac minis substantially less than that.

How Much Does the Average Mac-buyer Care?

But how much does the average Mac-buyer care? I’ve been almost exclusively a laptop user for the past 13 years, but even back when I used desktops, I almost always shut them down if I would be away from the keyboard for a half-hour or more. My observation was that most people were inclined to just leave their computers up and running all day, and even in many instances all night as well.

My inference, not only in the context of personal computers and other IT devices, is that while people like to think of themselves as being “green” and environmentally conscientious, their resolve tends to flag quickly when reducing their personal environmental footprint begins to involve more than minimal inconvenience and/or significantly increased cost, so that for many a commitment to “greenness” is heavier on politically correct rhetoric and feel-good exercises that let one imagine they’re “doing something” virtuous to save the planet with empty symbolic gestures rather than substantive behavior changes, like, say, taking fewer showers or washing clothes less often, or shutting off (or sleeping) their computer when not using it.

A Pew Research study found the average North American’s definition of what constitutes “necessity” these days includes a car (91 percent), washer (90 percent), dryer (83 percent), home air conditioning (83 percent), microwave (68 percent), TV (64 percent), car air conditioning (59 percent), and home computers (51 percent). Substantial minorities also included cell phone (49 percent), dishwasher (35 percent), cable or satellite TV (33 percent), and high-speed Internet (29 percent), and a few even considered a flat screen TV (5 percent) and an iPod (3 percent) “necessities.”

Am I being overly cynical? How much do Apple’s and the other computer-makers’ green efforts impact your buying intentions and user behavior?

These days, “going green” is all the rage. So it should be no surprise to anyone that “green” apps for the iPhone are, ahem, sprouting up all over.

I wonder though, with green-ness being such a trendy topic, are some developers just using the term as marketing? I gathered up the greenest apps I could find for my iPhone to see how much they might help me save the planet — and to see if they are true to the cause. The following are my findings.

Tips

I’m not the New Age, environmentally conscious type. Don’t get me wrong, I try to do the right things, but I’m not immersed in the movement, so to speak. But it’s my assumption that knowing how to do good for the environment is a combination of common sense and remembering the lessons taught on “Sesame Street.” In case you missed out on one or both of these key elements, the App Store carries a few free apps that give you tips for taking better care of the world around you.

• Go Green (free)
  Displays a tip each time you launch it. That’s it. I came across a useful tip or two that I hadn’t considered before.
• Green Tips (free)
  Displays a tip at launch. Hit the refresh button for more tips (though there are not many to cycle through). Email them off if you find them to be especially helpful — I didn’t.
• The Green Lemur (free)
  By far the most full-featured of these three. Search, add tips to favorites, or browse by category. I did find some interesting ideas here as well.

Measuring Up

What does your carbon footprint look like? How can you whittle down your personal impact on the environment, and maybe even put some extra green in your pocket at the same time? Glad you asked! While the following apps each have their own focus, each of them can help you figure out an answer to these questions. The best part is that if you truly give them a chance, you could start saving yourself some money while also lessening your impact on the environment.

• MeterRead ($2.99)
  Somewhat manual in usage (but then, no one said saving the planet would be easy!), use MeterRead to log your electric meter’s reading. You can log your readings and use them to predict your electrical consumption, and thus, your upcoming bill. Try to be more efficient, and maybe the next time you check the meter, your readings will hit below the projected usage. (More info on their site.)
• greenMeter ($5.99)
  My favorite of the bunch. Uses the accelerometer to determine the drag and resistance of your car/driving habits in real time. There are several usage meters to monitor, though real-time MPG has been my favorite. Really helps tune your driving for better efficiencies and fewer pointless emissions. (More info on their site.)
• shopgreen (free)
  By title, this doesn’t sound like it fits here, but it does. To use the app, just answer some questions about how you maintain your life. Answers that are good for the environment are tallied (like air-drying your clothes, or changing the furnace air filter), and the amount of CO2 you’ve saved is calculated. As a bonus, the CO2 savings gets you discounts at local, participating retailers for your efforts.

Shop Till You Drop

Shopping is shopping. If these weren’t free, I’d accuse them of capitalizing on the eco-friendly iPhone users. But they’re really just apps that help you find relevant retail locations nearby. I suppose if you used them to plan your route ahead of time, you’d put out fewer emissions driving back and forth.

• 3rdWhale (free)
  Much like other location-aware shopping apps (and dare I say, Google Maps?) 3rdWhale finds you businesses nearby (select walking, biking, or driving distances). So what makes it green? The resulting businesses are supposedly eco-friendly, allowing you to patronize those taking care of the world around us.
• Yowza! (free)
  Not yet out, Yowza! presents one of the more interesting ideas of the bunch. Also location aware, it brings up coupons for retailers nearby. So not only could it save you some cash, but it’s claim is that you can use the digital coupon right on your phone’s screen, rather than printing more paper that will just get tossed out.

Conclusion

In my experience, I wouldn’t say any of these are playing the “green” card for profit — they are all legitimately taking their own shot at saving the environment. Despite some being far less useful than others, (your mileage may vary, of course) their cause is still noble. If you’re thinking it’s time to give something back to Mother Earth, it can’t hurt to give any of these apps a try.

And of course, if you’ve got the goods on a green app that I missed here that’s made a difference for you, please share!

The iPhone is a lot of things to a lot of people. You can control your home, buy movie tickets, track projects, play games, and more. Now, you can also use it to help the environment. A Real Tree, a recent addition to the App Store, offers users a chance to use their iPhone or iPod touch to give back, in what could be the first in a wave of charitable apps.

Mokugift, the developers of A Real Tree, designed their application to stand in stark contrast to the much-publicized I Am Rich application, a vanity app which offered no utility and carried a very high price tag. A Real Tree also offers limited utility, in terms of adding functions to your iPhone, but that’s where the similarities end. The app is inexpensive, costing only $0.99, and it is designed not to show your wealth or massive ego, but instead your generosity. Using revenue generated by app sales, A Real Tree plants real trees in areas significantly threatened by deforestation, making it possibly the most appropriately named application available in the App Store. There is a one-to-one ratio of app purchases and trees planted, so the idea is simple…you buy the app, they plant a tree.

The real purpose of the app is clearly the real world tree planting, but it does have some features as well. Starting A Real Tree results in an animation of a tree growing, and then brings you to a screen where you can click a Safari link to view the existing forest. Mokugift tracks purchases of the app, and displays a running total of trees planted on their website, along with a visual map of where the real world trees are planted. The countries that receive trees bought through the app’s sales are Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, Zambia, India, Philippines, and Haiti. Each is located near the equator, in tropical regions where deforestation has the most significant effect on global warming. Clicking on the tree image on the app’s home page will also start a short animation of a bird flying in and around the tree. Mokugift promises additional features in future updates.

The model is simple, and has shown some early success (nearly 100 trees have been planted so far), so it could attract the attention of similar organizations. LIVESTRONG.COM previously released their Calorie Tracker app, but it’s designed to simply heighten brand awareness, whereas A Real Tree is attempting to actually generate charitable revenue. The iPhone/iPod touch platform is a good place for this sort of thing for a couple reasons. First, overhead is low. Developing a simple iPhone app and submitting it to the App Store is not expensive, especially when compared to the cost of things like mailing and door-to-door campaigns. Second, iPhone/iPod touch users are a good demographic to go after, if you’re looking for charitable donations. They’re more likely to have disposable income, and as we’ve recently seen, they’re generally comfortable with marketing on their devices, and with buying and downloading applications of all kinds. Let’s hope A Real Tree begins a trend of socially responsible iPhone/iPod touch development.

A Real Tree is $0.99 in the App Store.

With their latest lineup of products, Apple is pushing the new environmental features in an aggressive way. Rightly so, they are proud of their achievement — going from a heavily criticized Mac and iPod lineup a few years ago, to a set of very environmentally friendly products today.

Their environment page states, albeit in a typically corporate way, a commitment to creating ‘green’ gadgets:

Apple recognizes its responsibility as a global citizen and is continually striving to reduce the environmental impact of the work we do and the products we create.

The new U.S. ad campaign was launched on Monday night, and is coupled with a new page on the Apple site providing more environmental information. Not only is it the first TV spot Apple has released heralding environmental progress with their products, but it marks the start of any major campaign for the new MacBook lineup.

The Achievements

Some of the features of the new MacBooks which Apple is pushing include:

• Arsenic-free glass
• Brominated flame retardant-free
• Mercury-free
• PVC-free
• 41% smaller packaging
• Highly recyclable aluminum and glass enclosures

While Apple has been praised by many for the progress with their notebook line, work has still to be done on their lineup of desktop machines. Any mention of the environment is suspiciously absent from their iMac and Mac Pro pages. I’m confident that the next incarnations of these products will be promoted in the same way, marking the transition of Apple’s whole line to environmentally friendly materials (no doubt coupled with a glossy press photo showing each machine with a nature-themed wallpaper).

Advertising Focus

This new advert raises the topic of what product features Apple has a history of pushing in advertising. Recent campaigns have focused around the Mac’s superiority to Vista (and, judging by the number of “I’m a Mac” ads created, this is faring well for them). iPhone ads have similarly focused on the sheer range of features available in the software.

It’s difficult to judge exactly what consumers demand in a notebook, but I would think that the ground-breaking features in OS X have a great deal more advertising sway than pushing the environmental aspect of new MacBooks. I’m sure the new ads will compel some people to make the switch to Mac, but I don’t think they’ll be running on a long term basis.

The Latest TV Ad

This is a video of the latest TV advert, promoting a selection of environmental features in the new MacBook:

Do you think this is a wise route for Apple to take with their ad campaigning?

GoodGuide’s recently released application for the iPhone provides you with instant access to their 65,000+ strong database of safe, green, and healthy products.

Deemed the “world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental and social performance of everyday products and companies,” this is a great resource for those looking to avoid the abundance of chemicals we are constantly bombarding our bodies with, as well as be more environmentally conscious.

Their product descriptions give you an in-depth look at why the items received the scores they did, for reasons like “has no ingredients listed as skin or respiratory irritants” and “company has a low score in ethical policies and performance.” It also gives you a list of ingredients to avoid in product categories. For example, in colognes you should avoid oxybenzone and eugenol.

The app allows you to quickly check product reviews, ratings, and also find safer alternatives to what you may be buying. The ease of use is so great that you could actually use it while you’re in the store aisle, product in hand. If you have an account, you can create a personalized shopping list, making it easy to keep focused on what you need to pick up, or an “Avoid List” of items you don’t ever want to buy.

Currently, GoodGuide only covers personal care and household cleaning products, but they will eventually expand to include food, toys, and more to give you a better handle on the world of consumerism.

If you don’t have an iPhone though, you’re not left out in the smoke. GoodGuide also has an SMS service that allows you to text the type of product, product name, or UPC to get the same information the iPhone app provides, albiet not as elegantly.

GoodGuide is available for free via the iTunes store. The SMS service is also free, outside of your mobile provider’s SMS fees.

Consumers may be perceiving Apple as a more ecologically friendly company than they actually are, according to a new report by marketing research firm TDG.

Results of a survey of randomly selected participants found that roughly 30% believed Apple was the most environmentally friendly tech brand, with Dell and HP the next most popular choices, at 21% and 15% respectively.  The results are somewhat baffling, since Apple does not do nearly as much as some other companies to paint themselves as a so-called “green” company.

Survey participants were also just plain wrong about Apple.  While it has recently improved its standings in Greenpeace’s “Guide to Green Electronics,” it still falls behind Dell and HP based on the environmental organization’s comprehensive ranking system.  In the inaugural study in August of 2006, Jobs’ baby scored a paltry 2.7 out of a possible 10.  September 2008’s results saw Apple’s score climb to 4.1, which is still behind LG, Toshiba, Dell and HP.  Apple was listed as having improved in some categories, but still isn’t quite up to snuff on energy management and recycling.

So how does Apple get to be the greenest without actually getting the best scores or engineering their image through huge green-specific ad campaigns?  According to the author of the TDG study, Michael Greeson:

Chalk it up to effective marketing and the brand’s aura of simplicity in both design and usage.  In today’s market, aesthetics in branding and design matter when it comes to portraying a pro-environment message. Independent of whether Apple’s products and services are actually environmentally friendly, consumers perceive them as such. While other CE vendors may have to invest a fortune to improve their green image, Apple doesn’t seem to have this problem.

In other words, Apple’s branding seems to be subtly, inherently green.  It’s true that consumers tend to to cluster environmental responsibility with contemporary, clean, simple brands.  Apple is perhaps the best example in computer electronics, but Ikea demonstrates the same effect in the home furnishing sector.

When marketing trend analysts, and even some environmentalists, are forecasting an end to the effectiveness of green marketing, Apple may represent the green company of the future.  Commercials with voiceovers about carbon emission reduction are beginning to fall on deaf ears, but a company that appears casually environmental seems to strike a chord with those resistant to the in-your-face approach.  So how best to capitalize on this consumer misconception?  Bottom line is that Apple should just continue doing what they do, offering more services like iPod battery disposal and reducing their ecological footprint, but without showing off.  It’s the “Meh” approach to green marketing, and it sure seems to beat wrapping everything in bamboo.