Apple has been criticized by Greenpeace for being a poor environmental steward. My personal feelings about Greenpeace are mixed as I don’t care for their holier than thou attitude. The days of crunchy granola environmental activism are over- everyone’s in it now. I also think they have not looked at the big picture with Apple.
Apple just announced that they have sold 2.5 billion songs on iTunes. That’s 250 million plastic CDs and jewel cases that are not out there headed for landfills. Instead we have our music collections as digital files on tiny devices that last for years. Even the SONY walkmans of the eighties were about 15 times as massive as an iPod.
Now they are doing the same with movies, eliminating 2 million DVDs in the last year alone. This will accelerate as the movie studios keep joining them.

Those CDs and cases are made from petro products- if we are going to do environmental audits on companies we have to take a more strategic look these days and weigh the less obvious against the easy target.

Many Eyes is a free beta tool from IBM that creates ‘visualizations‘ from data sets. These are then shared on the site (there are thousands). Anyone can use it. MIT’s Technology Review has an article with details.
The one shown is carbon emissions by country shown as a cloud diagram.

San Francisco recently banned those plastic grocery bags that we see hanging from trees and stuck on chain link fences. I hate these things but I use them and I’m always surprised how, even in our two person (and two cat) household, they pile up. We seem to collect a big bag of them every week to take to the store for recycling.
The message inherent in the SF law must have been received because our local Wegmans stores are now selling reusable plastic fabric bags. Wegmans is an innovator and the openings of their new superstores generate massive turnouts so this is a good sign.
Increasingly it seems that California is setting the standard for enviromental law with other states quickly following. The question is, where’s the federal government? The answer is that the EPA went to the Supreme Court to prove that it did not have to enforce its own Clean Air Act! They lost but the fact that this absurd situation even took place is just one more reminder that the Bush people will do anything to protect their corporate energy sponsors.

Joel Makower gives an insider’s perspective on the soon to be announced X Prize program for development of a high mileage car that can be produced in volume and at a price point that is marketable. Like the X Space prize program that has ignited (sorry) the private space business, it is hoped that this will set up a gold rush of commercial innovation in the hidebound car efficiency design business.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Joel’s piece is the pragmatic approach they took to setting guidelines for winning. They are unusually realistic about dealing with the many agendas and opinions that often cripple these kinds of initiatives:

“There were still other challenges: what metric to use (fuel economy, fuel cost per mile, etc.) in designing the goal; which fuels would be allowed; and how to measure the carbon equivalency of different fuels — gasoline, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, and combinations thereof. None of these is an exact science, and each required a great deal of back-and-forth discussions, not to mention more than a little number-crunching.

“We’ve created and thrown out all sorts of guidelines,” says Goodstein with a sigh.”"

Avoiding ‘consensus by committee’ this early bodes well for this competition.

4/4 Update: The rules have been released for a 60 day comment period and the web site is up.