Dive Brief:
- Apple suppliers are going green faster than the tech giant anticipated, allowing the company to easily surpass its goal of bringing 4 GW of renewable energy into its supply chain by 2020.
- The tech industry has become a major developer of renewables, though industry in general is contributing. Fortune 500 companies with 100% renewables goals grew from 23 in 2017 to 53 in 2018.
- Apple said April 11 it has nearly doubled the number of suppliers committing to run related production on only clean energy, with the total number now 44.
Dive Insight:
By 2020, Apple said it will have more than 5 GW of clean energy powering the supply chain that helps produce its products. The announcement comes a year after it reached another milestone: powering its global facilities with 100% renewables.
"We've made it a priority to hold our suppliers accountable to the same environmental standards we observe and hope that our collaboration will show others what is possible," Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environmental policy and social initiatives, said in a statement.
The company also said it reduced its comprehensive carbon footprint for the third year in a row in 2018, "in large part due to the company's Supplier Clean Energy Program." Manufacturing makes up almost three-quarters of the company's carbon footprint, and the program presses suppliers to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy use.
Apple also said it has allocated all $2.5 billion of previously announced green bonds. Through the allocations, the company said it contributed to 40 environmental initiatives around the world, including projects Apple created to cover its entire electricity load.
Apple's green bond projects include solar rooftops in Japan and water conservation aquifers in Oregon, among others.
Google is currently the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world, as it tries to eliminate all emissions from its footprint. The company has purchased over 3 GW of renewable energy.
In 2017, Google announced it was purchasing sufficient renewable energy to power its global operations, but the search engine giant is now trying to attune the timing and location of its clean energy — a much tougher task. In 2018, the company published an analysis that showed none of its data centers in 2017 were matched 24-hours-a-day, every day with 100% carbon-free energy.
