Environmental Green Accounting at Apple Corps Ltd.

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ENVIRONMENTAL GREEN ACCOUNTING AT APPLE CORPS LTD

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Table of Contents
Introduction 3
Apple, Inc. and Green Accounting 3
Why Green Accounting 6
Initiating Green Accounting 6
Gathering Information 12
Learnings 13
Self Assessment Tool 13
Looking Ahead 16
References 17

Introduction
As business organizations' macroeconomic environment becomes more global, corporate strategies increasingly take into account corporate social responsibility (CSR) not only within the localities directly affected by the activities of the firms, but in a global scale. This resulted to corporations becoming responsible global citizens.
Hence, it is just time before the concept of environmental green accounting is developed and adopted by the truly global company.
Green accounting is a result of an increasing call for countries, more particularly large economies such as the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, to "pursue policies aimed at sustainable development" (Atkinson & Hamilton 1996, p. 16).
Environmental green accounting allows organizations to "understand the full spectrum of their environmental costs and to incorporate those costs in decision making" (Freedman 1996, p. 57). In other words, green accounting provides relevant information for companies to manage and reduce their environmental costs more efficiently and effectively.
This case study offers one example of environmental accounting principles being incorporated into Apple, Inc.'s (NasdaqGS: AAPL) daily decisions. Apple, Inc. is one of this era's true global organizations.
Apple, Inc. and Green Accounting
According to its Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) annual report filing for the fiscal year ended September 25, 2010, Apple, Inc. "designs, manufactures and markets a range of personal computers, mobile communication and media devices, and portable digital music players, and sells a variety of related software, services, peripherals, networking solutions, and third-party digital content and applications" (Apple, Inc. 2010, p. 1). Several of the technology giant's products include the Mac, iPhone, iPad and iPod.
With a business strategy of "bringing the best user experience to its customers through its innovative hardware, software, peripherals, services, and Internet offerings" (Apple, Inc. 2010, p. 2), it is inevitable that Apple's activities have a significant impact on the environment. Couple this with the firm's global reach - as of September 25, 2010, the organization has a total 217 retail stores and 84 of which are located outside the United States - its environmental costs can be staggering without proper management.
In this regard, Apple created a comprehensive environmental impact report which focuses on products with the following decision points:
 What happens when they are design,
 What happens when they make them, and
 What happens when customer take them home and use them.
In order to accurately measure a company's environmental footprint, it's important to look at the impact that company's products have on the planet. For the past two years, Apple has used a comprehensive life cycle analysis to determine where the greenhouse gas emissions come from which means that the firm measures total emissions generation is computed by
manufacturing + transportation + product use + recycling of products + facilities use
This formula is represented by Figure 1.

Source: http://www.apple.com/environment/
This proactive management of the firm's impact on the environment is due to Apple's realization that to improve their products, it needs to reduce its impact on the environment.
This resulted to the California company's designing their products to use less material, transported with smaller packaging, free of many toxic substance, and energy efficient and recyclable. Moreover, Apple promised its stakeholders - stockholders, employees, consumers, governments, and communities alike - that it will continue its progress toward minimizing its environmental impact with every new product it introduces.
For last 20 years, Apple has been working on ways to minimize the impact on company and products have on the environment. Apple developed and formulated the first environmental policy in 1990. In this regard, the technology giant can be considered a pioneer as environmental green accounting started gaining ground in 1987.
And from then on, Apple continued to develop their products more energy efficient, eliminated many toxic substances and also embraced renewable energy in most of its ...