Greenpeace says iPhone ain't green

Yep - we missed a trick. While we, and everyone else in the tech press, was busy pulling apart the iPhone to see what made it tick - we didn't actuall y stop to think about whether Steve Jobs had lived up to his commitment to improve Apple's approach to the environment.

Greenpeace on the other hand, don't seem to have bought into the famous Jobs reality distortion field. No doubt Apple fans will argue that, any product subject to this much scrutiny will have flaws - which is true - but Apple claim to be striving to be different - and being absolutely whiter than white - when it comes to recycling and the environment should be part of that surely.

Grreenpeace write:

In May, after thousands of you had participated in our Green my Apple campaign,Steve Jobs the boss of Apple claimed: "Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors" on environmental issues.

We watched closely when the iPhone was launched in June for any mention of the green features of the phone from Apple. There was none.

So we bought a new iPhone in June and sent it our research laboratories in the UK. Analysis revealed that the iPhone contains toxic brominated compounds (indicating the prescence of brominated flame retardants (BFRs)) and hazardous PVC. The findings are detailed in the report, "Missed call: the iPhone's hazardous chemicals"

You can find the whole report here - together with some funky YouTube videos:

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/iphone-s-hazardous-chemicals