The company announced on Thursday that tech giant Apple intends to use the world’s first low-carbon aluminum in iPhone SE.
With the help of $4.7 billion investments in green bonds, Apple could jump-start the development of new low-carbon manufacturing and recycling technologies, the company said in a statement.
Since 2016, Apple has issued three Green Bonds to accelerate progress toward the company’s goal of becoming carbon neutral across its supply chain by 2030.
As part of this work, Apple announced it is purchasing direct carbon-free aluminum from Canada-based ELYSIS – the company behind the world’s first direct carbon-free aluminum smelting process.
Aluminum is the first to be manufactured at an industrial scale outside a laboratory without producing direct carbon emissions during the smelting process. The breakthrough technology produces oxygen instead of greenhouse gases, and the achievement marks a major milestone in the production of aluminum, one of the world’s most widely used metals.
Apple said it intends for the material, produced by using hydropower, to be introduced in the iPhone SE.
Apple is committed to leaving the planet better than we found it, and our Green Bonds are a key tool to drive our environmental efforts forward, – Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, in the statement.
“Our investments are advancing the breakthrough technologies needed to reduce the carbon footprint of the materials we use, even as we move to using only recyclable and renewable materials across our products to conserve the earth’s finite resources,” she added.
This revolutionary advancement in aluminum production was spurred by Apple through an investment partnership with Alcoa, Rio Tinto, and the governments of Canada and Quebec that began in 2018.
The following year, Apple purchased the first-ever commercial batch of aluminum resulting from the joint venture, using it in the production of the 16-inch MacBook Pro. ELYSIS is a joint venture between Alcoa and Rio Tinto.
Apple has also significantly reduced the carbon impact of aluminum and other metals found in its products. By switching to recycled aluminum and aluminum smelted using hydroelectricity instead of fossil fuels, the company’s carbon emissions associated with aluminum have decreased by nearly 70 percent since 2015.
The company said that every model in the iPad lineup, including the new iPad Air, along with the latest MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and Apple Watch, are made with a 100 percent recycled aluminum enclosure.
