With its new miniaturized Mac Mini, Apple is offering a second product – and its first Mac – which benefits from its “carbon neutral” label. Under this initiative, the company purchases enough renewable energy to offset emissions generated by customers’ computer use.
Technology companies have been tracking, and in some cases reducing, the emissions profiles of their products for years. Usually, this involves asking suppliers about their own supply chains, where they get the authority to run their operations, and how they will ship finished products. But in 2023, with the Apple Watch Series 9, the Cupertino-based company took the unorthodox step of eliminating emissions from product use by investing more in renewable energy.
Powering something like a smartwatch is only a tiny fraction of the device’s overall carbon footprint; things like chips, displays, and batteries contribute much more to the total.
But with a product like the Mac Mini, using the device can generate far more pollution than charging a watch. It also represents a larger fraction of the device’s overall carbon footprint.
The reduction in the Mac Mini likely also helped reduce the footprint, although that’s impossible to say since Apple doesn’t present specific numbers for things like materials and manufacturing in its environmental disclosures.
What is remarkable, however, is the impact of semiconductors on a computer’s climate impact. Semiconductor manufacturing is energy intensive and uses chemicals with significantly higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. Manufacturing and shipping the base model Mac Mini, with 16GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, generates 32kg of carbon pollution, even after Apple accounts for its low-energy investments. carbon emissions. The high-end version includes many more chips, providing 64GB of RAM and 8TB of storage, almost quadrupling the carbon footprint to 121kg.
Ultimately, Apple says it resets these numbers for any Mac Mini by purchasing carbon credits from nature-based projects, like sustainably managed forests and restored ecosystems. But the difference between the lower and higher specs reveals how embedded carbon remains in the IT industry and how difficult it will be to eliminate the last bit.