The latest Laptop range from Apple is a new milestone in the company’s ethos to make more environmentally responsible consumer electronics. Critics like Greenpeace, who regularly beat their environmental breast plate to the rhythm of itunes have been strangely silent about the launch until recently. This may have been thanks largely to their inability to adequately market their evidence of ewaste abuse in China and trying to point a finger directly in the face of Steve Jobs.

They learned the hard way that it’s simply not cool to slag off something that’s considered cool to a large sway of their traditional support - college students and graduates. The backlash against Greenpeace was not a calculated stealth mission by a clever PR executive in Cupertino. The backlash came from within and was loudest on the Greenpeace website and blog.

As a result of falling contributions, Greenpeace has had little option but to back off so to speak - but the damage has been done, and it will take some time before they can shake off the conception that they’re a bunch of sanguine pretenders who pick on household brands to gain attention and not much else.

The good they have done on the subject of ewaste should not be swept under the carpet just because they’ve made a few tactical mistakes in their ongoing fight against ewaste.

It was Greenpeace who first opened our eyes to Guiyu, China. It took an organization like Greenpeace with a tradition of cutting through bull and border controls to bring home the shocking images of children, their hands and feet covered in mercury residue while washing themselves in a putrefied river, their single water supply.

Before then, people didn’t have any visual perception of how great the problem was. It was never considered a humanitarian crisis. Visual perception is a powerful weapon that can get things done fast - a power mobilized to full affect during the Ethiopian famine of 1984/5. For months previous we heard of thousands of people starving in Africa, but it took a crack team of BBC journalists to bypass border controls and get the images out. The rest was Bob Geldoff history, live aid and a fund raising PR machine which still raises millions today and provides rock stars like Bono and Sting a ringside seat at G7 summits - such is their influence as power brokers of global public opinion.

The revelations from towns like Guiyu had a similar opportunity to broker a new movement to tackle ewaste as a humanitarian issue, but the solutions proved to be complicate - it was much easier for Geldoff to scream at the camera “Give us your fucking money!” Raising money to buy food for the starving is a challenge - changing the fundamental problems of an eight hundred billion dollar electronics industry is something else.

If the problems of an industry can be distilled down to a single issue it is this: Only 10% of consumer electronics is recyclable. 90% will end up either in the ground or littered on the ground. Extracting the precious 10% out of this ewaste takes the lives of tens of thousands of peasant workers and their families every year through illness and disease caused by the toxic pollution created from the medieval recycling methods employed by their employers, who are (to all extent and purposes) gangsters.

Today GM and Chrysler are chastised for poor cars and wasteful management practices. But they are still able to produce cars which are over 90% recyclable. How is it that a car can be 90% recyclable, yet the greenest computer is still only 10% recyclable?

A car is 90% recyclable, the greenest Laptop is 10% recyclable… here in lies the green myth.

We don’t see mountains of cars rotting in piles so large they can be seen from space because legislation has been active for decades which demands adequate recycling and re-use. Your shinny new Hummer may guzzle that petrol, but you can be sure it’s made of 90% recycled material. Something to consider the next time an eco-warrior on his bicycle smugly tuts you to the tunes of his 10% recyclable iPod.

What’s more, 90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times (through second hand resale) before they are eventually recycled… compare this to 7% of consumer electronics.

90% of cars are re-used 2-3 times before recycling… only 7% of consumer electronics are re-used

Until electronics manufacturers have to abide by the same laws as car makers, the piles of ewaste will continue to double every 4 years. We are not going to stop buying electronics. What we can do is increase the reuse of electronics from a paltry 7% to a more respectable 50-70%, bring them more in line with the car industry. This would mean a significant drop in electronics sales and a dent in the trade of unrecoverable ewaste. We’d still be using the same cool gadgets with the same cool feature. Second Hand is cheaper of course, and with the economy on the bring of a depression, greener use of electronics might come sooner than later.

Mozilla Firefox is going organic, Asus are making bamboo computers, Chevron is becoming the new Greenpeace. In my days in advertising, countless man hours were spent mulling over the perfect green pantone at the bequest of stressed out corporate executives.

They’d spend small fortunes sending our work back and forth, re-shading their logos, desperate to capture that quintessential perfect green goodness – it’s too earthy, no, now it’s too bright, can’t we make it paler without being too soft?

Now greenness is in the hands of specialist PR consultancies and the true spin has really started taking shape. Comfy feely advertising (Chevron being perhaps the most recent culprit) now embellish our screens, lovingly symbolizing the beauty of humanity, embodying the spirit of our collective conscience – cue planet earth, cue little girl holding hands with daddy, cue forest, edit out villagers slaughtered by troops on Chevron’s payroll to intimidate local populations in Nigeria (upset that their drinking water is now a refinery’s sludge dump).

Chevron’s Story:

The Stories they don’t talk about:

If there’s one thing I have learned in advertising, symbolism is one of the most effective tools to master. Get this right and corporations will throw money at you like confetti and an illustrious career as a creative director is guaranteed.

I admire the Chevron adverts for their sheer beauty, thousands of man hours were lovingly spent on each and every one of them.
But like other religions at their conception, this one is starting to get out of hand as organizations jostle for position at the right hand of their new green deity.

I don’t want to get too cynical about green issues but it’s getting harder these days to see the wood from the flees. Environmentalism has it’s place in corporate America and the more they realize there’s a buck to be made, the more green they’ll become. This is all good.

But like the Catholic Church in the middle ages, who spent more embellishing fine cathedrals than doing the good that they preached, much more is being spent today embellishing the images of corporations than actually doing good for the planet. Is greenness following a religious path? Well, the unifying symbolism has already emerged… hallelujah.