Apple, showing its consent towards nature and the ecosystem, is buying enormously large 36,000 acres of trees in an attempt to preserve forests.
Teaming up with the US Conservation Fund, the company is making the investment in order to ensure that the working forest is sustainably harvested. Apple will use the paper from the forests for sustainable product packaging which guarantees to ensure that “forests stay forests” and harvesting timber is done in a sustainable way.
The total area protected by the agreement between Apple and The Conservation Fund is is larger than the city of San Fransisco, according to the press release. The land is bought in two areas; Reed Forest in Maine and Brunswick Forest in North Carolina.
Apple is clearly leading by example:The one that we hope others will follow,” said Larry Selzer, president and CEO of The Conservation Fund. “By all accounts, the loss of America’s working forests is one of our nation’s greatest environmental challenges. The initiative announced today is precedent-setting.”
Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives and former administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, told BuzzFeed News that the company managing its own supply chain — rather than buying pulp from outside vendors — represents a massive step forward.
“Imagine if every time you opened a package from a company you knew that it came from a working forest,” she said. “And imagine if companies took seriously their paper chain and made sure that was renewable, just like energy. And imagine if they didn’t just buy renewable paper, but took the step of ensuring that they would stay working forests forever.”
Apple declined to say how much paper it uses in its packaging, but the company does sell hundreds of millions of iOS devices a year, each of which comes in a paper package that’s composed of about one-third nonrecycled fiber.
“We feel a deep responsibility to take real action and make sure we’re addressing our own footprint, ” She stated. “And if we take the approach of just buying sustainably sourced paper, we’re not making the world a better place — we’re zeroing out. Apple has been really clear that we want to leave the world better than we found it; that’s one of our values.” “Where we want to get, of course, is 100 percent,” said Jackson.
Since Tim Cook took over, Apple has focused more on environmental efforts.Apple has also cut down on its use of conflict minerals and recently announced that it was building an $848 million solar farm in California.It has made great strides over the past few years to ensure the environmental sustainability of its supply chain and today’s “precedent-setting” deal marks another step in the right direction.
