'There's no greater crisis than climate change,' says Apple boss

COPENHAGEN: The negative consequences of global warming present a major challenge for companies, according to Apple boss Tim Cook, who called climate change the most pressing problem of these times.

“There’s no greater crisis than climate change. You don’t have to look beyond the summer, at the droughts and the wildfires and the heat,” Cook told dpa.

“All of these things are constant reminders of how important this is,” Cook told dpa in Denmark’s Nordjylland, where the company runs a solar farm with a Danish partner, which supplies power to Apple’s European data centre in Viborg.

“I think it’s in shareholders’ best interest that companies work on climate change,” he said.

Cook stressed that his group’s environmental policy is not just greenwashing, a practice he slammed as “reprehensible.”

“If you look at what we are doing, we’re doing the hard work,” he said.

Apple’s offices, retail stores and manufacturing facilities have been carbon neutral since 2020, according to the company, which has committed to being completely carbon neutral by 2030. By then, not only Apple’s operations but also its whole supply chain should be carbon neutral and all its products, he said.

That calculation also includes the power consumption of the devices themselves.

Cook emphasized that Apple’s field of solar panels exemplified his company’s climate activities. “We also took 30% of the content of the Apple Watch, and it comes from recycled materials now. We shrunk our packaging and we’re taking all of the plastics out of the packaging by next year.”

Cook further commented on criticism that Apple makes it hard for customers to repair Apple products themselves. “On the right to repair, we’ve done so much already,” he said, adding, “We’ve got so many people that are certified to do repairs.” He said many people do not want to repair their own phones, so Apple tried to make it easy to find service providers.

Apple wants people “to trade in their phone when they get a new phone. And what we do with that phone is, if it’s still working, we’ll clean it up and resell it,” he said. “If it’s not working, we’ll take it apart and recycle the materials.”

Cook called this a “great virtuous circle.” – dpa