Apple plans to achieve carbon neutrality in 2030, and chip manufacturing accounts for "most carbon emissions" of electronic devices, rather than energy consumption or hardware use. Chip production itself can also be improved, including improving the efficiency of adjusting air, water temperature and pressure. Apple plans to be carbon neutral by 2030.

Apple plans to achieve 1 carbon neutrality in 2030. According to foreign media reports, Apple announced last year that it would achieve its 100% carbon neutrality goal in 2030, but its chip supply partner TSMC became the biggest obstacle. It is reported that TSMC's production activities have a great impact on the environment, and its goal is to achieve 100% carbon neutrality in 2050.

In July 2020, Apple promised that all its businesses would be carbon neutral, covering its supply chain and the whole product life cycle. This includes reducing emissions by 75% by 2030 and developing solutions to eliminate the remaining 25% carbon footprint. However, the supply chain may be the biggest obstacle for Apple to achieve its lofty goals, and chip production can be said to be one of the chief culprits of carbon emissions.

TSMC also promised to achieve net zero emissions, but it will not be achieved until 2050, 20 years later than Apple's target date.

At the same time, TSMC also consumes a lot of water, consuming about 63 million tons of water in 20 19 years.

Udit Gupta, a researcher at Harvard University, and his co-authors wrote in a paper in 2020 that chip manufacturing accounts for "most carbon emissions" of electronic devices, rather than energy consumption or hardware use.

With the outbreak of COVID-19 epidemic boosting the demand for electronic products and the closure of factories due to blockade measures, the global shortage of high-end chips has increased people's attention to this industry.

Due to the global chip shortage, the technology industry is in a state of tension, which brings pressure to manufacturers to increase production. For chip foundries like TSMC, increasing investment to become more environmentally friendly is increasingly becoming a severe challenge.

A TSMC spokesman confirmed that energy consumption accounts for 62% of the company's carbon emissions. TSMC's emission reduction plan began with an agreement with Danish energy company Orsted in 2020, which built a 920 MW offshore wind farm in the Taiwan Province Strait. According to this 20-year agreement, TSMC will obtain all the electricity produced by the company through clean energy.

Shashi Barla, a renewable energy analyst at Wood Mackenzie, an energy consulting firm, said that the transaction was described as the world's largest enterprise renewable energy procurement agreement, which was of great benefit to TSMC. He said that while ensuring clean power supply, he also paid the wholesale cost and got rid of the price shock, which can be called "killing two birds with one stone".

Chip production itself can also be improved, including improving the efficiency of adjusting air, water temperature and pressure. This is very important for the chip foundry, because the production of the chip factory depends on the dust-free environment. TSMC also uses scrubbers and other systems to deal with gas emissions.

Clifton Fonstad, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that TSMC's activities in reducing emissions may have an impact on other chip manufacturers because "other manufacturers may follow suit."

As for the cost of the reform, Mark Li, a Bernstein semiconductor analyst, said that TSMC can easily bear it. He said: "TSMC has a high profit margin and made a lot of money. Therefore, although these environmental protection measures will have corresponding costs, they are affordable. More and more consumers are willing to pay higher prices for more environmentally friendly equipment. "

Apple plans to be carbon neutral by 2030. In recent years, Apple's mobile phone has always regarded environmental protection as one of the key factors in making products, processing technology and raw material selection, and even made some concessions in commodity accessories. For example, mobile phone chargers and headphones have been cancelled.

The IPhone 13 just released some time ago goes further. Judging from the exposed pictures, the plastic packaging film was removed from the packaging box, and then the paper tearing design scheme was selected.

Apple's mobile phone shows that it is no longer decided to cover the iPhone 13 series packaging boxes with plastic film, thus using 600 tons less plastic. This move is also to complete the overall goal of completely eliminating plastic packaging by 2025.

Actually, it's more than that. According to Apple official website, iPhone 13 focuses on minimizing the adverse impact on the environment, such as upgrading plastic water bottles to more powerful and high-performance raw materials to manufacture antennas, which is the first time in the industry.

I don't know, what data signal is the antenna made of plastic water bottle?

In addition, iPhone still uses 100% to recycle rare earth elements in magnets such as MagSafe, 100% to recycle tin in motherboard solder and 100% to recycle tin in battery management unit solder for the first time. For these two models, 100% recycled gold is still used for electroplating the metal wires of the motherboard and the front and rear cameras.

Apple's mobile phone shows that the global company's operations have been carbon neutral at this stage, and it is planned to achieve zero adverse climate impact of the entire company's business by the end of 2030, including the manufacturing supply chain and the entire product life cycle.

This means that every sold Apple device will be 100% carbon neutral from parts manufacturing, assembly, transportation, customer selection and charging to equipment and raw material recycling.

Earlier, Apple announced an ambitious plan to achieve carbon neutrality in the entire industrial chain and product life cycle by 2030. Apple's goal is to make full use of raw materials by producing durable products. Another ambition established by Apple is that one day all Apple products and packaging will only use recycled and renewable materials.