Apple cuts ties with green electronics body

Ars Technica reports.

EPEAT is one of the largest eco-friendly certifying agencies in the country, funded by the EPA and a coalition of manufacturers, including Apple.

Certain schools, government agencies and businesses require their IT departments to buy EPEAT-certified products, so Apple's move could eliminate them as an option for many institutions.

In order to earn EPEAT's blessing, a product has to follow certain requirements to qualify, The Droid Guy says.

For electronic products, this means recyclers should be able to easily open or disassemble a unit using a common tool for easier separation of toxic components like batteries and chips.

Apple will no longer seek certification from EPEAT, although the company has partly built its reputation for being an advocate for environmentally friendly products ranging from building data centres running on renewable resources to getting rid of toxic chemicals in the components it is using.

The withdrawal from EPEAT is a setback to Apple's campaign to undo the damage to its reputation inflicted by nearly a decade of Greenpeace protests, CNN Money says.

And it could have a material effect on Apple's efforts to sell more of its products into government markets. In 2007, former US president George W Bush signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to use EPEAT when purchasing computers.

According to EPEAT's registry of participating manufacturers, Dell has 171 EPEAT-certified products, Hewlett-Packard has 221, and Samsung has 309.