Apple accused the consumers with Apple Watch 'Carbon -Neutral' misleading

Apple customers submitted a class action lawsuit against the company and stated that they misleaded consumers by claiming that certain Apple watches are carbon -neutral. In order for a product to be regarded as carbon neutral, its manufacturer must compensate for or cancel any pollution that the article generates.

Apple said in 2023 that “selected case and band combinations” of his Apple Watch Series 9, Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch SE would be the first carbon-neutral devices of the company. The lawsuit was submitted in the name of someone who bought these watches. It is said that the products were not really carbon neutral because they were based on faulty offset projects that did not really reduce the company's greenhouse gas pollution.

The lawsuit shows how difficult it is to promise the sustainability of a product by trying to compensate for or capture the carbon dioxide emissions it generated. Instead, many environmental representatives have urged to switch technology companies from fossil fuels to clean energy and to manufacture products that take longer and easier to repair.

The company's carbon neutral claims were wrong, and the seven plaintiffs would not have bought the Apple watches or not paid for them as much if they knew that the lawsuit claimed. “Apple false advertising can lead [consumers] In order to select its products for really sustainable alternatives, ”says the complaint submitted on Wednesday before a federal court in California.

Apple stands by his claims. “We are proud of our carbon neutral products that are the result of industry-leading innovations in terms of clean energy and carbon-poor design,” said Apple spokesman Sean Redding in an email.

According to Redding, the company has reduced Apple Watch emissions by more than 75 percent. The company focused on reducing the pollution from materials, electricity and transport, with which the watches were partially switched to clean energy by converting the suppliers.

In order to deal with the remaining pollution, Apple is investing in “natural -based projects to remove hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon from the air”. The new lawsuit finds problems here.

In order to compensate for their emissions, many companies buy carbon loans from forestry projects that represent the tons of carbon dioxide from planets, which naturally catch trees and soil. Apple mainly bought credits from the Chyulu Hills project in Kenya and the Guinan project in China, the lawsuit says. It is claimed that none of the projects have fulfilled a basic standard for carbon offset, namely that they record additionally CO2, which would otherwise not have been considered, would not have paid Apple to support the project.

After the complaint:

The Chyulu Hills project claims to generate CO2 credits by preventing the deforestation on land that has been legally protected from deforestation since 1983, while the Guinan project claims to have planted trees on “barren land” that were already heavily forested before the project began. In both cases, the carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of the participation of Apple or the existence of the projects. And since the demands of Apple Carbonutrality are based on the effectiveness and legitimacy of these projects, Apple's CO2 neutrality is wrong and misleading.

Apple is far from being exposed to the only company before accusations for CO2 offset projects. Dozens of well-known brands of airlines, retailers, banks and more have rely on “Junk” carbon-offs to make CO2 neutral requirements, a 2022 Bloomberg Investigation found.

This is also not the first time that Apple's first carbon -neutral products have been checked. The company must be more transparent in terms of its supply chain to support its carbon neutral claims, the Institute for Public and Ecological Affairs announced in a separate report in 2023. This report showed that the emissions of Apple suppliers increased.

A better measure of the environmental impact of a company is whether its entire CO2 footprint, which includes its operation, the supply chain and the use of its products. A company can specify to produce a more sustainable product, but it could possibly sell so many products that the company as a whole has a larger CO2 footprint.

For consumers who want to restrict their own CO2 footprint, they are probably better at keeping their current devices on their current devices as long as possible. Apple's CO2 footprint as a company was smaller between 2021 and 2023, even without CO2 offset, according to the latest sustainability report. But Apple was still 16.1 million tons of CGO2 emissions in 2023, which corresponds approximately to the emissions of 42 gas power plants in one year. And while Apple has made some progress, there is still a long way to repair devices more easily.