Newton’s Lore

So it turns out that tucked away on the Apple Store is a page about Apple Australia’s recycling program. Basically if you’ve bought a Mac at the online store, on the phone or at the Sydney Apple Store they’ll take away your old gear.

Presumably though you couldn’t buy an iPod nano and get them to take away a pile of junk, although it does mention requests will be considered on a case-by-case basis. No UPS’s or cracked or naked CRT’s either.

Following their earlier assessments of Apple and the iPod, Greenpeace has given video game maker Nintendo a 0/10 environmental score. Motorola and Nokia also copped serves.

Apple are running a trade-in and recycling program for US Educational customers, which offers features such as:

• All recycled hard drives are ground into confetti-sized pieces.
• Data on all hard drives to be resold is deleted in a manner consistent with federal standards.
• Customers receive a certificate of destruction for each lot recycled through the program.
• All asset tags and other identifying information are removed prior to disposition.
• No waste from Apple’s U.S. recycling program is shipped outside North America.

The last part is interesting given that the ‘waste’ wouldn’t have originally originated in North America anyway, having mostly been constructed somewhere in Asia from parts manufactured in Asia.