Does Apple’s abandonment of EPEAT mean it’s going less green?

Apple’s decision to abandon EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) has generated a wave of speculation as to what the move means for the future of the hardware maker’s green endeavors. At the heart of the controversy is the company’s newest MacBook Pro with Retina Display, which Apple designed in such a way that it’s difficult to disassemble for the sake of repairs, upgrades, and recycling.

A bit of background: EPEAT announced late last week that Apple was removing all 39 of its existing entries from the EPEAT registry. The statement simply said that Apple had been a founder and a longtime supporter of the program and that EPEAT hoped the company would return. Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT, later elaborated to CIO Journal: “They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements. They were important supporters, and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

Apple has remained mum on the move, at least to the public, but is almost certainly receiving inquiries from federal and local agencies, schools, businesses, and consumers that use the EPEAT registry as a guideline for choosing which computers and monitors they’ll purchase.

Apple’s newly released MacBook Pro with Retina Display may play a critical role in Apple’s decision to dump EPEAT. According to iFixit.com, it’s extremely difficult to disassemble. When the site’s team of dissemblers cracked open a unit, they “found a whole mess of pretty, yet difficult to access components. In fact, the MacBook Pro with Retina display earned our lowest repairability score ever, with 1 out of 10 points.”

Presumably, that lack of repairability would have cost the new MacBook Pro a Gold rating on the EPEAT registry. The registry uses dozens of criteria to score products, including ease of disassembly. That’s important from both an environmental conservation perspective and a business perspective: A product that can be easily dissembled can be repaired or upgraded with simple tools, meaning organizations can get extended use out of them. It’s also faster and easier to recycle a product that’s simple to disassemble, as parts can be quickly extracted intact for reuse.

Evidently, Apple made a conscious choice to eschew the “repairability” criterion in building the new MacBook Pro. Per iFixit’s teardown:

• You need a special screwdriver to access the machine’s internals, even to simply remove the bottom cover.
• The RAM is soldered to the logic board and thus can’t be upgraded beyond the 16GB max.
• The proprietary SSD isn’t upgradeable.
• The battery is glued rather than screwed into the case, which increases the chances that it’ll break during disassembly.
• The battery covers the trackpad cable, which increases the chance that a user will shear the cable in the battery removal process.
• The display assembly is completely fused, with no glass protecting it. If anything ever fails inside the display, you will need to replace the entire (extremely expensive) assembly.

All this leads to some key questions: First, why did Apple, which has taken pains to defend and promote its environmental record, roll out a machine that would not meet EPEAT standards? In years past, the company has demonstrated an arguably unrivaled panache for engineering magic; even its ultralight, ultrathin MacBook Air achieved EPEAT gold. Could it be that Apple’s engineering magic has faded and it couldn’t devise a way to cram all the functionality it wanted into this new model while adhering to best green practices?

A more cynical perspective (voiced by at least one Level 4 user on the Apple forums): Apple is intentionally moving toward a closed-box model, where consumers can’t customize or upgrade their Macs and are forced to replace machines entirely when the old ones no longer work.

If that is Apple’s game, it marks a blow to the green movement, even if Apple continues to adhere to other EPEAT criteria, such as high power efficiency, little to no toxic materials, and so on. It means a lot more waste as organizations and consumers are forced to ship products back and forth or call in an expert when repairs are necessary, then to send them off for recycling when they no long meet a user’s needs.

The fallout for this should prove interesting, especially given Apple’s history of defending its eco-sensitivity against the likes of Greenpeace. The company is effectively forcing organizations and consumers to choose between using Apple and being green. In time, the company may find that, for some customers, green is more important, both from an environmental perspective and a cost-saving perspective. The company has its work cut out in convincing people who care that it’s still fully committed to green, not just committed so long as it’s convenient.

If there’s a positive side to Apple’s bold move — again, the company went so far as to have 39 previous listed items remove from the registry — it’s that it may force the minds behind EPEAT to rethink the registry’s scoring criteria. The group has taken pains to involve manufacturers, customers, and third-party experts in crafting criteria that are fair, relevant, and meaningful, but some changes could be necessary to reflect how computer hardware has evolved. However, it’s tough to imagine the dropping ease of disassembly as a key criterion, given its impact on how easily a product can be repaired, upgraded, and recycled.

This story, “Does Apple’s abandonment of EPEAT mean it’s going less green?,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.