Apple claims that its new Apple Watch is carbon neutral. It’s not

“It’s more stuff, and more stuff always leaves a mark.”

Last week Apple launched its new Apple Watch Series 9. Apparently the world’s best-selling watch now has a “magical new double tap gesture; a brighter display; faster on-device Siri, now with the ability to access and log health data; Precision Finding for iPhone; and more”.

Apple also claims that its new Apple Watch is carbon neutral.

The company is, according to its press release, “Investing in high-quality carbon removal”:

After achieving steep reductions in product emissions, Apple plans to cover residual emissions with high-quality carbon credits primarily from nature-based projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, like restoring grasslands, wetlands, and forests.

Obviously, it’s worth taking a closer look at this claim of “high-quality carbon removal”.

In 2021, Apple launched the Restore Fund together with Conservation International and Goldman Sachs. The Restore Fund will “make investments in forestry projects to remove carbon from the atmosphere while generating a financial return for investors”.

In April 2023, Apple announced that the Restore Fund would be managed by Climate Asset Management, which is a joint venture of HSBC Asset Management and Pollination, a climate investment firm. HSBC is Europe’s second largest banker to the fossil fuel industry.

Monocultures of industrial tree plantations

Here’s a photograph of one of these forestry projects - from Apple’s website:

While Apple describes this as “sustainably certified working forests”, it is in fact a monoculture industrial tree plantation. It’s a plantation funded by Arbaro Advisers, a Frankfurt-based investment advisory company.

Apple states that it will buy “high-quality carbon credits” to offset the emissions from manufacturing and transporting its new Apple Watch. These offsets will come from “projects like the Restore Fund’s investments with Arbaro Advisers and BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group” in Paraguay and Brazil.

BTG Pactual is Latin America’s largest investment bank. Between 2018 and 2022, BTG Pactual invested US$1.67 billion in forest-risky products such as soy, beef, timber, pulp and paper, and palm oil.

In 2022, BTG Pactual handed over US$281.9 million to beef corporations Minerva, Marfrig, and JBS. These three companies are responsible for about 70% of Brazil’s beef exports. And beef is the major driver of deforestation in the Amazon.

Timberland Investment Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of BTG Pactual. Timberland Investment Group is one of the world’s largest timberland investment management organisations. It currently manages 1.2 million hectares of largely industrial tree plantations in the US, Brazil, Uruguay, and Chile.

In June 2023, Mongabay reported on Timberland Investment Group’s plans to establish 300,000 hectares of industrial tree plantations in Mato Grosso Do Sol in Brazil’s Cerrado, the world’s most biodiverse savanna.

The plantations are will feed the world’s largest eucalyptus fibre pulp mill, with a capacity of 2.3 million tons of pulp per year. Suzano, the biggest pulp and paper company in Latin America, is currently constructing the pulp mill.

Not long after the construction of the pulp mill started, BTG Pactual invested US$67.6 million in Suzano through shareholding and bond issuance.

In 2021, Timberland Investment Group and Conservation International launched a Latin American reforestation strategy, which aims to raise US$1 billion over five years. The “reforestation strategy” aims to remove 35 million tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere. Timberland Investment Group sells carbon credits from its industrial tree plantations and from its reforestation projects.

Mongabay reveals the close links between BTG Pactual and Conservation International. André Esteves, head of BTG Pactual is a board member of Conservation International. And Iuri Rapoport, co-head of environmental, social, and corporate governance at BTG Pactual, is president of Conservation International Brazil’s Deliberative Council.

Needless to say, Conservation International has said absolutely nothing about the social and environmental impacts that will inevitably follow the construction of Suzano’s massive pulp mill. Neither will it raise so much as a peep against the hundreds of thousands of hectares of monoculture plantations that will feed the pulp mill - at the expense of the Cerrado ecosystem.

Don’t fall for Apple’s Greenwashing

Writing on the Planet Earth & Beyond, Will Lockett acknowledges that Apple has made some progress on reducing its emissions. Apple partially uses recycled materials, and 50% of the transport avoids flying.

But he advises us not to fall for “Apple’s greenwashing”.

Lockett points out some of the problems with Apple’s natural carbon credits. “They are incredibly dubious for carbon-neutral claims,” he notes. The calculations of carbon stored is difficult and natural carbon sinks are vulnerable to wildfires and are not a safe form of carbon storage.

When industrial tree plantations are clearcut much of the carbon will return to the atmosphere.

The NewClimate Institute posted a series of questions and answers about Apple’s “carbon neutral” announcement. NewClimate Institute notes Apple’s claim to only buy carbon credits from “high-quality” projects and comments that,

[T]he forestry and land-use carbon dioxide removal projects that Apple pursues simply cannot fulfil such criteria, due to fundamental issues which make such projects especially inappropriate for emission neutralisation claims. Due to natural or human-induced disturbances such as forest fires, land degradation or land-use change, carbon storage in forestry and land-use projects is likely to only be temporary, and therefore in no way comparable with not having emitted GHGs in the first place.

Gregory Barber, a journalist with Wired, speaks to David Ho, a climate scientist at the University of Hawaii, who tells him that,

“There is no such thing as a carbon-neutral product. It’s kind of silly. It gives consumers the idea that there are ways out of these problems that don’t involve consuming less.”

Barber praises Apple’s efforts to clean up its act. But he points out that avoiding air transportation doesn’t make emissions disappear. “Boats still burn fuel, after all,” he writes. “Recycled materials can’t cover everything. More stuff is still more stuff.”

Barber writes that the Apple’s offsets are generated in part by “turning tracts of degraded grazing land, previously home to cattle, into tree plantations”.

He notes that,

The biggest potential problem is known as “leakage.” What stops a cattle operation displaced from a plot of land diverted to underpin carbon credits from sowing destruction somewhere else that isn’t managed or protected? In other cases, carbon credit projects have been accused of propping up companies that also engage in less forest-friendly work elsewhere.

A 2022 report by the Environmental Paper Network explains that

While acquiring land previously converted by cattle ranching and developing eucalyptus plantations, the paper industry does not repair damage by restoring forests, as it commonly claims to do. On the contrary, it destroys the surviving fragments of Cerrado which, thanks to its deep roots, tends to survive land conversion and to naturally regenerate.

Apple declined to comment on the record when Barber contacted the company.

Barber concludes that,

Apple is making progress toward reducing the carbon emissions involved in making its alluring products, in a world that still makes that hard to do. But perhaps it’s time to retire the phrase. No, your new watch isn’t carbon neutral. It’s more stuff, and more stuff always leaves a mark.

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