New Delhi: Technology giant Apple has partnered with an environmental NGO, Frank Water, to develop data and analytics-driven solutions to strengthen water management and conservation in India.
Under the partnership, the two have begun a pilot in Anekal taluk on the outskirts of Bengaluru, where Frank Water is surveying households and analysing multiple data sources to map how water is used in the area.
The partnership will build on the data collected to improve decision-making around shared water resources by bringing together leading experts, local organisations, businesses, and community members.
“Some of the most powerful solutions to climate change and the global water crisis come from the communities living every day with these challenges,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, who is currently in India, told ThePrint.
“By supporting innovative, community-based approaches in India and around the world, Apple is making progress towards our global climate goals while doing our part to help people improve their lives,” she added.
On India’s role in helping Apple achieve its goal to become carbon neutral by 2030, she said: “When I was here in 2016, (since then) things have changed. Apple’s presence in the country has grown… we are now thousands of employees employed directly with Apple and thousands and thousands more (as) contract workers with Apple. Our manufacturing is growing, (and) our user base is growing as well. As each one of these grows, so has the carbon ambition. You can’t grow one and not worry about the other, because the 2030 goal is not moving.”
Apple had in 2020 announced plans to become carbon-neutral across its entire business, manufacturing supply chain, and product life cycle by 2030.
Pointing out that the company is in the third year of its 10-year carbon-neutral plan, Jackson said it has had the effect of putting focus across the company sectors.
“Apple has hardware, software and services. We have stores, we have offices around the world. We have data centres. Every one of those has to be carbon-neutral by 2030. So, it’s kind of a wonderful focusing moment, but it can’t just stop with focus,” she said.
“You really have to think about all the different levers that you can push and the big ones for us… actually, the easiest part… was our own facilities… wherever we have Apple employees working… so offices, retail stores, data centres. Apple has been running on 100 per cent clean energy since 2018,” she added.
Replying to a query on interaction with the Indian government over environmental issues, Jackson said: “I just did meetings with government officials and they were encouraging me to go faster. India has made some pretty strong commitments at the national level, and many of the states have as well. And we don’t find it challenging, we find lots of opportunity. We find a situation where the market is growing and developing for clean energy, and that’s a great opportunity for us to be part of.”
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‘We want our products back’
According to Jackson, for Apple, part of the strategy to be carbon-neutral is focused on how material is used in products.
“The circular economy for us is a real opportunity. It means that we have to first start with designing and making engineering products that last for a very long time, through many, many years of upgrades of software,” she said.
She added that Apple users have the option to trade-in their older devices when buying a new one, which also helps with the cost of the new product — an option that is popular globally, and also in India.
“So then begins the circle. Now you traded in your device, maybe your device still has some life, so it may get resold, or it may get repurposed somewhere else. At the end of its life, for an Apple product, the company wants those products back so that we can recover material from them. We spend a lot of time engineering materials, so we want them back so that we can put them back into the global supply chain. So, you get the real circle and that is our ambition,” Jackson explained.
She pointed out that getting used products back is a key part of Apple’s climate change pledge because it would reduce the requirement for new material. Hence, there will be less carbon emissions associated with mining and processing and refining of new material.
“Our CEO (Tim Cook) has set the goal that someday he wants 100 per cent of a new device to be recycled… Currently, across all of our products, we’re about 22 per cent recycled. We still have 78 per cent to go… but we’ve made some real progress,” Jackson said.
On this trip to India, Jackson will visit a mangrove ecosystem in Maharashtra’s Raigad district, which Apple is helping preserve.
The company has given a grant to Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF) which is working with the local community to “safeguard the future of these mangroves by creating alternative, sustainable industries in the local communities that cultivate and benefit from the biodiversity and resilience of the mangrove ecosystems”.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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