The leadership of Apple Inc. took an encouraging step forward last Thursday in a bid for a higher green leadership profile in the IT industry by releasing an update of its recent environmental accomplishments. The centerpiece is a summary of a lifecycle assessment of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with all of its products.

The company also did a much better job this year discussing the breadth of its carbon footprint in the annual Carbon Disclosure Project report released last week. Apple's reporting score shot up from a dismal 7 last year when it barely answered any substantive questions, to 73 this year; even surpassing rival Dell at 66. It also released emissions data in a manner that makes it more comparable with other IT sector reporters. However, unlike its competitors, it still refuses to make specific GHG emission reduction commitments.

Apple's lifecycle assessment (LCA) is notable for including an estimate of the power gobbled up by its computers over a projected four-year lifetime (three years for iPods). The company's study concluded that electrical power consumed during product use accounts for the largest amount of GHG emissions -- 53 percent (or 5.3 million metric tons), with mining and manufacture ranked second at 38 percent (3.8 million metric tons).

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This expanded disclosure was a response to a shareholder proposal [PDF] filed by As You Sow Foundation (Note: I am the director of As You Sow's Corporate Social Responsibility program) with the company and voted on last February at the company's annual meeting. You probably didn't realize it was a response because Apple did not acknowledge that shareholders such as As You Sow, the New York City pension funds and Green Century Funds have been pressing for better data for more than a year. The fact that we even had to raise this issue at a company where one of the world's most prominent climate change evangelists, Al Gore, sits on the board, was disappointing.

A BusinessWeek story published last week, including an interview with Apple CEO Steve Jobs about its progress on environmental issues, said Apple wants to change the terms of the debate on green ranking. The company complains that peers' reports on GHG emissions are mostly limited to operations and not supply chain and emissions related to consumer use.

That is a fair point: I agree HP and Dell should be further along in assessing their supply chain emissions. Previous GHG data released by Apple competitors have sometimes only included assessment of the carbon footprint of their operational offices and not their supply chain, making carbon footprints appear much smaller than they are. When Dell announced recently it had a achieved a goal of becoming "carbon neutral," many consumers probably did not know that it meant that it was "operationally" carbon neutral, and is still assessing its supply chain emissions which will likely dwarf final assembly operations emissions.