Apple has spent years positioning itself as a leader in corporate sustainability. The company has committed to becoming carbon neutral across its entire value chain by 2030, while investing heavily in renewable energy, recycled materials, lower-carbon manufacturing and carbon removal.
There is good reason to take those efforts seriously. Apple says it has already cut its global greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60% compared with its 2015 baseline, and its suppliers have dramatically increased their use of renewable electricity. The company is also using more recycled materials in products and has redesigned parts of its packaging and transportation strategy to reduce emissions.
But there is another side to the story.
Apple remains one of the world's largest technology companies, selling hundreds of millions of devices and relying on a vast global manufacturing and supply chain. Most of the environmental footprint of an iPhone, Mac or Apple Watch occurs before the customer even turns the device on. At the same time, Apple's claims around carbon-neutral products and carbon removal have attracted criticism, while questions about repairability, product longevity and the wider environmental cost of constant hardware production remain.
So is Apple genuinely becoming a more sustainable technology company, or is its environmental messaging getting ahead of the underlying reality?
The answer is more complicated than either extreme.
Apple has made substantial progress in areas such as renewable electricity and recycled materials. Its influence over suppliers also gives it the ability to drive environmental changes far beyond its own offices and facilities. But reaching its 2030 goal will require much more than buying renewable electricity and putting recycled materials into new products. The company ultimately needs to reduce the emissions associated with manufacturing its enormous product range while demonstrating that the remaining emissions can be responsibly addressed.
In this article, we'll look at what Apple has actually achieved, where its sustainability strategy deserves credit, where the company's claims deserve scrutiny, and how realistic its 2030 target looks from where we stand today.
Apple's headline environmental ambition is straightforward: become carbon neutral across its entire value chain by 2030. But what Apple means by “carbon neutral” is more nuanced than the phrase might suggest.
When Apple introduced its Apple 2030 plan in 2020, it committed to bringing its entire carbon footprint to net zero by the end of the decade. Unlike Apple's earlier focus on its own offices, stores and data centres, the 2030 target covers the much larger emissions associated with manufacturing, suppliers, transportation, product use and other parts of its value chain.
The strategy is built around two stages. First, Apple aims to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 75% compared with its 2015 baseline. It then plans to balance the remaining emissions using carbon removal projects, with the company saying it will prioritise nature-based solutions that meet rigorous international standards. Apple's current environmental strategy makes clear that carbon removal is intended to deal with the emissions that cannot be eliminated through direct reductions.
That distinction matters.
Apple isn't promising to eliminate every tonne of greenhouse gas associated with its business by 2030. It is promising to make a 75% reduction from its 2015 baseline, then address the remaining 25%.
On Apple's own figures, the company has made substantial progress.
According to Apple's 2026 Environmental Progress Report, its greenhouse-gas emissions in 2025 were more than 60% below its 2015 baseline. Apple says this happened while its revenue increased by 78% over the same period.
That's an impressive reduction, particularly for a company whose business has continued to grow dramatically.
However, there is an important caveat: the latest year did not bring another major reduction. Apple's 2026 environmental update says emissions in 2025 remained more than 60% below 2015 levels, essentially holding at the 2024 level despite significant business growth.
That doesn't mean Apple has stopped making progress. It does, however, suggest that the next stage of decarbonisation could be considerably harder.
The company has already captured many of the relatively straightforward opportunities, such as switching its own electricity consumption to renewable sources. Cutting the remaining emissions requires deeper changes to manufacturing, materials, transportation and the energy systems used throughout Apple's supply chain.
This is arguably the most important part of Apple's sustainability strategy.
Apple has sourced 100% renewable electricity for its own offices, retail stores and data centres since 2018, and it says it achieved carbon neutrality for its corporate emissions in 2020. But those operations represent only a small part of the company's overall footprint.
The much larger challenge is manufacturing the products themselves.
Apple's 2026 environmental report identifies its supply chain as the largest portion of its carbon footprint. That means Apple's environmental impact depends heavily on what happens inside the factories producing iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple Watches and other devices.
Apple has therefore been pushing suppliers to transition to renewable electricity for Apple-related production. Its 2025 environmental update reported that 17.8 gigawatts of renewable electricity had been brought online across its supply chain, helping avoid an estimated 21.8 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions in 2024.
Apple is also tackling emissions that cannot simply be solved by switching electricity sources. Semiconductor and display manufacturing, for example, can release highly potent fluorinated greenhouse gases. Apple says its direct display suppliers and 26 semiconductor suppliers have committed to reducing these emissions from Apple-related production by at least 90% by 2030.
This is one of the stronger aspects of Apple's approach.
Rather than focusing solely on making its own buildings more efficient, Apple is using its enormous purchasing power to push environmental requirements into the companies that manufacture its products. Given the scale of Apple's supply chain, that potentially gives its climate strategy an influence well beyond the company's direct operations.
It's easy to look at a headline such as “Apple cuts emissions by more than 60%” and assume that the company is almost three-quarters of the way to carbon neutrality.
That's not quite how the target works.
Apple needs to reach a 75% reduction from its 2015 baseline before relying on carbon removals to address the remaining emissions. In other words, the company still has a significant amount of direct decarbonisation to achieve.
And the remaining emissions may be among the most difficult to eliminate.
Manufacturing complex electronics requires energy-intensive processes and a wide range of materials, while Apple's enormous global supply chain makes complete decarbonisation considerably more complicated than simply switching its offices to renewable electricity.
There is another reason to look beyond Apple's headline percentage.
In 2024, Apple reported 15.3 million metric tons of gross greenhouse-gas emissions, according to The Verge's analysis of Apple's environmental reporting. That illustrates the scale of the challenge: even after years of progress, Apple's business still produces millions of tonnes of emissions each year.
This is where Apple's 2030 strategy becomes more controversial.
Apple intends to deal with the emissions it cannot eliminate through carbon removal and other forms of carbon credits. The company says these projects will meet rigorous standards, and it has invested in initiatives intended to restore forests and other ecosystems.
But carbon removal is much harder to evaluate than simply measuring how much renewable electricity a factory uses.
A tonne of emissions avoided through a direct efficiency improvement is relatively straightforward to understand. A tonne of carbon supposedly removed through a forest project involves assumptions about how much carbon is stored, how long it will remain there, whether the project would have happened without the investment, and what happens if the forest is damaged or the underlying land agreement expires.
Those concerns are not merely theoretical in Apple's case.
In August 2025, Reuters reported on a German court ruling that Apple could no longer advertise certain Apple Watches as “CO2-neutral” in Germany. The case focused on the carbon-removal project Apple used to support its claim, including concerns about the long-term security of land leases for eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay.
Apple has defended its broader approach to carbon neutrality, but the ruling demonstrates why “carbon neutral” is not necessarily synonymous with “zero emissions.”
That's an important distinction for consumers.
At this stage, I'd describe Apple's climate strategy as ambitious and substantial, but not yet proven.
The progress is real. Apple has cut its reported emissions by more than 60% from its 2015 baseline, moved its own electricity consumption to renewable sources, pushed suppliers toward clean energy and increased the use of recycled materials. Those aren't meaningless changes.
But Apple still needs to reduce its emissions substantially further, and the company is approaching the more difficult part of its 2030 target. Its eventual success will depend less on impressive individual initiatives and more on whether it can continue reducing the emissions embedded in the manufacturing of millions of devices every year.
And that's why Apple's sustainability story shouldn't be judged solely by its renewable-energy purchases or its most environmentally friendly products.
Apple says MacBook Neo contains 60% recycled material by weight. Its enclosure is manufactured using a forming process that requires 50% less aluminium than traditional machining, while the anodisation process achieves a 70% water-reuse rate.
- •60% recycled material by weight
- •50% less aluminium used in enclosure forming
- •70% water reuse during anodisation
- •100% recycled cobalt in the battery
- •The product uses a substantial amount of recycled material
- •Its enclosure manufacturing process is designed to reduce raw material use
- •Water reuse forms part of Apple's manufacturing approach
- •These figures do not represent the product's complete environmental footprint
The real test is whether Apple can reduce the environmental footprint of its entire business while continuing to grow.
That's where the company's supply chain, product design, materials and manufacturing processes become crucial.
If Apple wants to become carbon neutral by 2030, switching its own offices and stores to renewable electricity is not enough. The much bigger challenge lies in the factories that manufacture its products.
Apple says the electricity consumed by its manufacturing suppliers is the largest single source of greenhouse-gas emissions in its supply chain. That makes its Supplier Clean Energy Program one of the most important parts of the Apple 2030 strategy. According to Apple's 2026 Environmental Progress Report, suppliers had procured more than 20 gigawatts of renewable energy in 2025, generating more than 38 million megawatt-hours of clean electricity and avoiding more than 26 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Those are substantial numbers. But they need some context.
Apple's corporate electricity story is relatively straightforward.
The company says it has operated its offices, retail stores and data centres on 100% renewable electricity since 2018, and it achieved carbon neutrality for its corporate operations in 2020. In 2025, Apple itself procured another 1.8 gigawatts of renewable energy for those facilities. (Apple's environmental overview provides the company's latest figures.)
The problem is that Apple's own buildings are not where most of its emissions come from.
Manufacturing an iPhone, Mac, iPad or Apple Watch involves a huge network of suppliers producing chips, displays, batteries, aluminium, glass and other components before the finished product ever reaches an Apple store. Much of that manufacturing takes place in countries where electricity grids have historically relied heavily on fossil fuels.
Apple therefore has much less control over its environmental footprint than the company's clean-energy claims might initially suggest.
Apple's response has been to use its enormous purchasing power to influence the energy choices of its suppliers.
The company's Supplier Clean Energy Program provides suppliers with information, training and access to renewable-energy procurement options. Apple also says its Supplier Code of Conduct now requires its direct manufacturing suppliers to use 100% renewable electricity for Apple production before 2030.
The scale has grown considerably.
Apple says its suppliers had brought more than 20 gigawatts of renewable energy online in 2025, compared with roughly 18 gigawatts in 2024. The company estimates that this generated enough electricity to avoid more than 26 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions during the year.
There are some genuinely impressive elements here. Apple isn't simply buying renewable electricity for itself and declaring victory. It is trying to change the energy mix of a manufacturing network spanning thousands of facilities and numerous countries.
That creates a potential multiplier effect: if suppliers invest in renewable-energy infrastructure to meet Apple's requirements, some of that capacity can also influence their other customers and operations.
Apple itself points to this broader effect in its 2026 supply-chain reporting, noting that suppliers are developing renewable-energy businesses, entering power-purchase agreements and adopting new procurement models that can potentially be used beyond Apple's own supply chain.
This is where Apple's figures deserve a little more scrutiny.
When Apple says that supplier renewable-energy projects avoided more than 26 million tonnes of greenhouse-gas emissions, that doesn't mean 26 million tonnes of emissions physically disappeared from the atmosphere.
The figure represents estimated avoided emissions compared with a counterfactual in which the relevant electricity would otherwise have come from more carbon-intensive sources. The actual climate benefit depends on factors such as the type of renewable project, where it is located, when electricity is generated and how the local electricity system operates.
This distinction is common in corporate climate accounting, and it doesn't automatically make Apple's numbers misleading. But it does mean that “20 gigawatts of renewable energy” should not be interpreted as “20 gigawatts of Apple's factories are completely independent of fossil-fuel electricity.”
The details of how renewable electricity is procured therefore matter.
Apple says suppliers are using a mixture of power-purchase agreements, green-power trading and other procurement mechanisms. Its 2026 report also acknowledges that cost-effective procurement remains challenging in some markets, including China, South Korea and Japan.
That admission is significant. It shows that the transition isn't simply a matter of Apple telling suppliers to install solar panels. Electricity markets, regulation, grid infrastructure and the availability of credible renewable-energy contracts all affect what suppliers can actually do.
Apple's leverage over suppliers is one of the strongest arguments in favour of its sustainability strategy.
The company is one of the world's largest buyers of electronics manufacturing capacity, giving it considerably more influence than an ordinary consumer brand. When Apple makes renewable-energy requirements part of its supplier relationship, manufacturers have a financial incentive to invest.
Apple has also expanded its requirements beyond electricity. Its environmental strategy includes energy efficiency, direct emissions from industrial processes and the use of lower-carbon materials.
For example, Apple says its direct semiconductor suppliers are working toward reducing at least 90% of certain fluorinated greenhouse-gas emissions associated with Apple production by 2030. These gases can have extremely high global-warming potential, making them important even though they represent a smaller part of the overall emissions picture.
This is a good example of why Apple's sustainability programme is more substantial than simply putting solar panels on corporate buildings.
One reason to be cautious about Apple's progress is that the company's strongest commitments are generally concentrated on its direct suppliers and Apple-related production.
Apple's supply chain extends far beyond the companies assembling finished products. Raw materials, component manufacturers and lower-tier suppliers can sit several steps removed from Apple, making the environmental footprint much harder to track and influence.
Apple says its supply chain includes thousands of supplier facilities across more than 60 countries. Its Supply Chain Innovation programme outlines requirements covering environmental practices, responsible sourcing and energy use, but the sheer scale of the network makes complete visibility difficult.
This is a problem that isn't unique to Apple. Electronics manufacturing is unusually complex, and virtually every major technology company faces similar challenges.
It does, however, mean that Apple's 2030 target should not be interpreted as meaning every factory and every raw-material supplier in its global ecosystem will suddenly become emissions-free in 2030.
The reality is more complicated.
Broadly, yes — but the headline figures should be interpreted carefully.
There is strong evidence that Apple is driving a genuine expansion of renewable electricity among its manufacturing suppliers. More than 20 gigawatts of renewable energy procured by suppliers in 2025 is not a trivial achievement, and Apple's requirements are creating pressure for manufacturers to change how they source electricity.
This is one area where Apple's environmental claims deserve genuine credit.
At the same time, renewable electricity addresses only part of Apple's footprint. Manufacturing also requires materials, industrial heat, chemicals, transportation and complex processes that cannot simply be decarbonised by signing a renewable-energy contract.
And there is an even bigger issue.
Apple's total emissions remained more than 60% below its 2015 baseline in 2025, but essentially unchanged from 2024 despite significant business growth, according to Apple's latest environmental update.
That suggests the company's renewable-energy programme is producing meaningful reductions, but it also shows why Apple cannot rely on renewable electricity alone to reach its 2030 goal.
The next stage will depend increasingly on what Apple puts into its products, how those materials are produced, how efficiently those products are manufactured, how long they remain in use and what happens to them at the end of their lives.
And that brings us to one of the most visible parts of Apple's sustainability strategy: recycled materials and the attempt to build a more circular product ecosystem.
One of the most visible changes in Apple's sustainability strategy is the increasing use of recycled materials in its products.
Apple has spent years trying to reduce its dependence on newly mined materials by replacing virgin aluminium, cobalt, rare earth elements, gold, copper and other materials with recycled alternatives. The company says that in 2025, 30% of the materials it shipped in its products came from recycled or renewable sources, its highest proportion yet. It also says that more than 99% of the tungsten, 99% of the gold and 99% of the cobalt used in its products came from recycled sources, according to its 2026 Environmental Progress Report.
This is particularly important for materials such as aluminium, where the emissions associated with extraction and processing can make material sourcing a significant part of a product's environmental footprint. This is also important because the environmental impact of an electronic device begins long before it reaches a customer.
Mining and processing metals can require substantial amounts of energy and water and can cause habitat destruction, pollution and other environmental damage. Increasing the amount of material recovered from existing products can reduce the need to extract some new resources.
But there is an important distinction between using more recycled materials and creating a truly circular electronics industry.
Apple has made some impressive advances in specific materials.
Its products increasingly use recycled aluminium, recycled cobalt in batteries, recycled rare earth elements in magnets and recycled gold in components and circuit boards. Apple says its 2025 products contained more recycled material than in any previous year, while its use of recycled and renewable materials has expanded significantly since the company began publishing detailed environmental targets.
The change is particularly noticeable in materials that have traditionally carried a significant environmental cost.
For example, Apple says all of the cobalt in its batteries now comes from recycled sources. Cobalt is an important battery material, and its mining has attracted considerable scrutiny because of environmental and human-rights concerns in major producing regions.
Apple has also expanded its use of recycled rare earth elements in magnets. That matters because rare earth mining and processing can be environmentally intensive, and recycling provides a way to recover materials that have already entered the global economy.
Apple's Materials and Resources page provides details of the company's current approach, including its goal of increasing the proportion of recycled and renewable materials across its products.
Aluminium has long been one of Apple's most prominent sustainability targets.
Apple says its products increasingly use recycled aluminium, and the company has developed low-carbon aluminium procurement initiatives alongside its work on recycled material.
This matters because producing primary aluminium is extremely energy intensive. Recycled aluminium generally requires far less energy than producing aluminium from newly mined bauxite, meaning that replacing virgin aluminium with recycled material can reduce the carbon footprint associated with a product.
Apple's move toward recycled aluminium therefore has a fairly direct environmental rationale.
But recycled material isn't automatically emissions-free.
Recycling itself requires energy, transportation and processing infrastructure. The environmental benefit depends on what material is being replaced, where the recycled material comes from and how efficiently it can be recovered and processed.
So the most useful way to view Apple's recycled-material programme isn't as “recycled equals green.” It's as one tool for reducing the environmental impact of material extraction and manufacturing.
Apple has also invested in technology designed to recover materials from old devices.
The best-known example is Daisy, Apple's disassembly robot designed to take apart iPhones and recover valuable components and materials. Apple says Daisy can disassemble up to 1.2 million iPhones per year, allowing materials such as cobalt, lithium, gold, copper and rare earth elements to be recovered.
Apple has also developed other recycling systems, including Taz, a machine designed to recover rare earth magnets and other materials from electronic waste, and Dave, which focuses on recovering rare earth elements from the Taptic Engine.
These technologies are interesting because they address a fundamental problem with electronic waste: modern devices contain relatively small quantities of many valuable materials, often tightly integrated into complex components.
Traditional recycling systems aren't always designed to recover those materials efficiently.
Apple's investment in specialised disassembly therefore has the potential to make higher-value material recovery more economically viable.
This is where the sustainability argument becomes more complicated.
A genuinely circular economy would keep materials in use for as long as possible, minimise waste, repair products rather than replace them unnecessarily, and recover materials at the end of a product's useful life so they can be used again.
Recycling is only one part of that system.
A smartphone that is difficult or expensive to repair may still generate significant environmental impacts even if most of its aluminium and cobalt can eventually be recycled. If consumers replace devices frequently, the environmental cost of manufacturing the replacement remains.
This is why Apple's sustainability strategy cannot be judged solely by the percentage of recycled material in a new iPhone or Mac.
The most sustainable device is generally the one that doesn't need to be replaced in the first place.
That makes durability, software support, battery replacement and repairability just as important as recycled content.
Apple has made some progress on repair.
The company launched its Self Service Repair programme, giving customers and independent repair providers access to genuine Apple parts, tools and repair manuals for certain products. Apple has also redesigned some newer products to make specific repairs easier.
The company says it has expanded access to repair services and parts substantially over recent years.
But independent repair advocates argue that Apple's products can still be difficult to repair because of component pairing, specialised tools, design choices and restrictions around replacement parts.
The iFixit repairability scores provide a useful independent counterpoint to Apple's own sustainability messaging. iFixit has repeatedly highlighted the difficulty of repairing certain Apple products, while also acknowledging that Apple has made improvements in some recent generations.
The picture is therefore mixed rather than simply “Apple is bad at repair.”
Apple has made meaningful improvements, but there is still a difference between making a product technically repairable and making repair affordable, convenient and practical for ordinary consumers.
Apple's Trade In programme is another important part of its circularity strategy.
Customers can return eligible devices for credit, after which Apple may refurbish the device for another customer or recycle it if it cannot reasonably be reused. Apple's Trade In programme therefore gives older devices a pathway back into the company's ecosystem rather than leaving them unused in a drawer or sending them directly to landfill.
This is positive, particularly when a device can be refurbished and used again.
But there is a subtle problem with treating trade-in as an environmental solution.
A recycling or trade-in programme doesn't reduce the environmental impact of producing a new device.
If someone trades in a perfectly functional iPhone after two years and buys another one, the old phone may have a second life — but Apple has still manufactured another device, extracted or processed the materials needed for it and transported it around the world.
The environmental benefit is much greater when reuse and refurbishment extend the total useful life of the original hardware.
There is little doubt that Apple's use of recycled materials has improved.
The company is recovering more valuable materials from old electronics, increasing recycled content in new products and investing in technologies that could make electronic-waste recovery more effective. Its 2026 environmental reporting shows that these efforts are no longer small pilot projects but a significant part of Apple's materials strategy.
That deserves credit.
But Apple's sustainability story becomes less convincing if recycled materials are treated as proof that its products are “green.”
A smartphone still has to be mined, manufactured, assembled and transported before it can be recycled. Even a device containing a high proportion of recycled materials can have a substantial environmental footprint.
The bigger question is therefore whether Apple can combine recycled materials with longer product lifespans, better repairability, effective refurbishment and genuinely high rates of material recovery.
If it can, Apple would move closer to a genuinely circular electronics model.
If it simply uses more recycled materials while continuing to sell an enormous number of new devices every year, the environmental gains will be real — but much more limited than the marketing language might suggest.
Recycled materials are an important part of Apple's sustainability strategy. They are not, by themselves, proof that Apple's products are sustainable.
Even if Apple succeeds in cutting its emissions by 75% from its 2015 baseline, the company expects to have a substantial amount of greenhouse-gas emissions left over.
Its solution is carbon removal.
Apple's 2030 strategy calls for the remaining emissions to be balanced through carbon removal projects, with the company saying it will prioritise high-quality projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere rather than simply avoiding future emissions. This distinction is important: reducing an emission and removing carbon from the atmosphere are not the same thing.
Apple has therefore invested heavily in nature-based carbon removal, most notably through its Restore Fund.
Apple launched the Restore Fund in 2021 in partnership with Conservation International and Goldman Sachs, initially committing up to $200 million to invest in forestry projects intended to remove carbon from the atmosphere while generating financial returns for investors.
Apple later expanded the initiative, announcing an additional $200 million investment with Climate Asset Management in 2023. The company said the expanded fund would support high-quality carbon removal projects involving the restoration and protection of forests and ecosystems.
Apple's Restore Fund is designed around a relatively simple idea: invest in projects that restore forests and other ecosystems, generate carbon removals and create a financial incentive to protect those ecosystems over the long term.
The concept is attractive.
Forests naturally absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, while protecting existing forests prevents stored carbon from being released. If carbon finance can make forest conservation and restoration economically valuable, it could potentially deliver both climate and biodiversity benefits.
But measuring those benefits is considerably harder than measuring how much renewable electricity a factory consumes.
A tonne of carbon dioxide emitted from burning fossil fuel remains in the atmosphere for a very long time.
A tonne of carbon claimed to have been removed through a forest project is different.
The carbon might be stored in trees for decades, but forests can burn, be damaged by drought, suffer disease or eventually be cleared. Climate change itself can increase some of these risks.
That creates a fundamental problem known as permanence.
If Apple uses a forest project to compensate for a tonne of emissions today, the climate benefit depends partly on whether the carbon remains stored for the relevant period. If the forest burns ten years later, some or all of that claimed removal may effectively be lost.
This is one reason carbon-removal projects need safeguards, monitoring and conservative accounting.
It is also why environmental organisations have become increasingly cautious about corporate claims based on forestry offsets.
There is another concept that matters: additionality.
A carbon project should ideally result in emissions being removed or avoided that would not otherwise have happened.
Imagine a company funds the protection of a forest that was never actually at risk of being cleared. The forest might still absorb carbon, but it is difficult to argue that the company's money caused the additional removal.
The same problem can occur with reforestation. If trees were going to be planted regardless of the carbon-credit investment, claiming the resulting carbon removal as a climate benefit becomes much less convincing.
This doesn't mean every forestry project is ineffective.
It means the quality of the underlying project matters enormously.
And for a company like Apple, which uses carbon removal to support a headline claim of carbon neutrality, the credibility of those projects becomes part of the credibility of the entire environmental strategy.
This isn't simply an academic debate.
Apple began marketing certain Apple Watch models as carbon neutral in 2023. The company said it had reduced the product's emissions through renewable electricity, recycled materials, lower-carbon shipping and other measures, then addressed the remaining footprint through carbon credits.
The claims attracted criticism from climate researchers and environmental commentators who questioned whether the carbon credits represented genuine, durable carbon removal.
The Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media was particularly critical of Apple's carbon-neutral product claims, arguing that the accounting and offsets used did not justify presenting the watches as carbon neutral in the way consumers might reasonably understand the term.
TechCrunch also examined the controversy in its analysis of Apple's environmental claims around the Apple Watch Series 9, highlighting concerns over Apple's reliance on carbon offsets to address the emissions it could not eliminate directly.
Then, in 2025, the controversy became more concrete.
A German court ruled that Apple could no longer advertise certain Apple Watches as “CO2-neutral” in Germany. Reuters' report on the ruling said the case concerned the carbon-removal project Apple relied on to support the claim, including questions around the security of land leases associated with a eucalyptus plantation project in Paraguay.
The ruling does not prove that Apple's entire environmental strategy is fraudulent or that its carbon-removal projects have no climate value.
But it does demonstrate something important:
A company can make genuine progress on emissions reduction while still making environmental claims that regulators or independent experts consider too strong.
Those two things can be true at the same time.
It would also be unfair to describe Apple's entire 2030 strategy as an offsetting exercise.
Apple's stated hierarchy is to reduce emissions first and use carbon removal for the emissions that cannot reasonably be eliminated. That is fundamentally different from simply continuing business as usual and purchasing enough credits to cancel the resulting emissions.
The company's 2026 Environmental Progress Report emphasises direct emissions reductions across manufacturing, energy, materials and transportation before carbon removal is used for the residual footprint.
That distinction matters.
If Apple actually achieves a 75% reduction in its emissions from the 2015 baseline, carbon removal would represent a much smaller part of the company's overall climate strategy than it would if Apple were attempting to offset most of its existing emissions.
The problem is that we don't yet know whether Apple will achieve that 75% reduction on schedule.
Until it does, the credibility of the final 25% remains partly theoretical.
Nature-based removal has benefits beyond carbon
There is also a case for Apple's investment in nature restoration that goes beyond climate accounting.
Well-designed forest and ecosystem projects can potentially protect biodiversity, restore degraded land, improve soil health and provide income to local communities. Apple's Restore Fund has been designed to generate financial returns alongside environmental benefits, rather than treating carbon removal as a purely charitable activity.
That approach is potentially valuable because large-scale climate action will require investment models that can attract private capital.
But those additional benefits don't eliminate the need for rigorous carbon accounting.
A project can be excellent for biodiversity and still be a poor carbon-removal project.
Likewise, a project can remove carbon while providing limited benefits for local communities.
The environmental quality of the project therefore matters more than the existence of a carbon credit itself.
So, should we count Apple's carbon removals as genuine sustainability?
Yes—but with significant qualifications.
Apple's investment in carbon removal is better understood as a necessary but imperfect part of its 2030 strategy rather than evidence that the company has solved its emissions problem.
The strongest part of Apple's climate strategy is still direct emissions reduction: cleaner electricity, more efficient manufacturing, lower-carbon materials and changes to its supply chain.
Carbon removal should come after those measures, not instead of them.
And this is where Apple's own 75% target is important. If Apple manages to cut three-quarters of its 2015 emissions and then responsibly removes the remainder, its 2030 strategy would represent a substantial environmental achievement.
If the company struggles to reduce its direct emissions and increasingly depends on carbon credits to maintain the appearance of carbon neutrality, the criticism becomes much harder to dismiss.
For now, the fairest conclusion is somewhere in between.
Apple's carbon-removal investments are serious, but carbon removal should not be confused with eliminating emissions. The real measure of Apple's climate progress will remain the emissions it manages to prevent in the first place.
That distinction becomes particularly important when we look at one of the biggest criticisms of Apple's sustainability strategy: whether its environmental marketing sometimes goes further than the underlying evidence.
The word “greenwashing” gets used very easily in discussions about corporate sustainability. A company makes an environmental claim, someone questions it, and suddenly the entire sustainability programme is dismissed as marketing.
Apple's case is more complicated.
There is plenty of evidence that Apple is making genuine changes to its products, manufacturing processes and supply chain. The company says its greenhouse-gas emissions were more than 60% below its 2015 baseline in 2025, while 30% of the material in products shipped that year came from recycled content. It has also pushed suppliers toward renewable electricity and increased the use of recycled materials across its products.
Those achievements shouldn't simply be dismissed as greenwashing.
But that doesn't mean every environmental claim Apple makes is beyond criticism.
The problem is the language of “carbon neutral”
The biggest controversy has surrounded Apple's decision to describe certain Apple Watch models as “carbon neutral.”
When Apple introduced carbon-neutral Apple Watch models in 2023, it said the products had achieved substantial emissions reductions through changes to materials, manufacturing, electricity and transportation, with the remaining emissions addressed through carbon credits and nature-based projects.
Apple's own explanation is important here. The company says its carbon-neutral products were designed around direct emissions reductions first, with carbon removal used for the remaining footprint. Apple has said it reduced the carbon footprint of the relevant Apple Watch models by more than 75% before addressing the remainder through nature-based projects.
That is a very different proposition from simply continuing to emit the same amount of carbon and purchasing offsets.
Nevertheless, the phrase “carbon neutral” can give consumers a much simpler impression: that the product effectively has no climate impact.
That is where the controversy begins.
Apple has faced legal challenges over its environmental claims
In February 2025, Reuters reported that Apple was sued in the United States over its carbon-neutral Apple Watch claims. The plaintiffs alleged that two of the carbon-offset projects Apple relied upon did not represent genuine additional emissions reductions.
Those were allegations made in a lawsuit, rather than findings that Apple had committed wrongdoing. Apple disputed the underlying criticism and continued to defend its environmental claims.
But later that year, Apple faced a more significant setback in Europe.
In August 2025, a German court ruled that Apple could no longer advertise certain Apple Watches as “CO2-neutral” in Germany. According to Reuters' reporting on the decision, the court criticised Apple's reliance on a carbon project in Paraguay, including uncertainty surrounding the long-term land arrangements supporting the project.
The case was brought by environmental organisation Deutsche Umwelthilfe, which argued that Apple's advertising amounted to greenwashing.
This is an important distinction.
The German ruling did not establish that everything Apple does on climate is greenwashing. It addressed whether a particular environmental advertising claim was sufficiently supported.
That's a much narrower — and more defensible — criticism.
Why the carbon project mattered
The controversy centred on a forestry project involving eucalyptus plantations in Paraguay.
Apple had used the project to compensate for part of the emissions associated with its carbon-neutral products. The court questioned whether Apple could make a long-term carbon-neutrality claim when significant portions of the land involved were secured through leases that did not extend far enough into the future.
The underlying issue is permanence.
If a company says a tonne of carbon dioxide emitted during manufacturing has been compensated by a tonne of carbon stored in a forest, that stored carbon needs to remain locked away for the claimed climate benefit to hold.
Trees can burn, be cut down, suffer from drought or disease, or otherwise release their stored carbon.
In this particular case, Reuters reported that the court found leases covering 75% of the project area were not secured beyond 2029. That uncertainty was one of the reasons the court rejected Apple's “CO2-neutral” advertising claim.
Again, that doesn't mean planting trees has no environmental value.
It means that the climate benefit of a carbon-removal project depends on much more than the number of trees planted.
Greenwashing isn't the same as making a sustainability claim that later gets challenged
This distinction is important if we want to be fair to Apple.
A company can make an environmental claim in good faith and still have that claim challenged by regulators, courts or scientists.
Apple has published unusually detailed environmental information compared with many consumer brands. Its 2026 Environmental Progress Report provides data on emissions, materials, renewable electricity, recycling and other aspects of its environmental programme.
Apple also openly states that its 2030 goal requires a 75% reduction in emissions from its 2015 baseline, with the remaining emissions addressed through carbon removal.
That level of disclosure makes it difficult to argue that Apple is simply hiding its environmental footprint.
The stronger criticism is different:
Apple's environmental marketing can sometimes make a complicated climate strategy sound simpler and more definitive than it really is.
“Carbon neutral” sounds absolute.
The reality is conditional.
It depends on emissions accounting, reductions, assumptions about carbon removal and the long-term effectiveness of projects used to balance residual emissions.
Apple's environmental marketing has changed
There is also evidence that Apple itself has recognised the changing regulatory environment around environmental claims.
Following the German court ruling, Reuters reported that Apple was expected to move away from the “carbon neutral” product label as new European rules governing environmental claims came into force.
That doesn't necessarily mean Apple has abandoned its climate strategy.
In fact, Apple's current environmental messaging focuses much more heavily on measurable reductions, recycled materials, renewable electricity, lower-carbon transportation and its 75% emissions-reduction target. Its current environmental page describes Apple 2030 as a goal to reduce emissions by 75% before balancing the remainder through high-quality carbon-removal projects.
That is arguably a better way of communicating the company's progress.
Instead of asking consumers to believe that a product has no climate impact, Apple can show how much its footprint has actually been reduced.
So, is Apple greenwashing?
Not in the simplistic sense.
It would be difficult to describe Apple's entire environmental programme as greenwashing when the company has demonstrably changed its manufacturing requirements, increased renewable-energy procurement, reduced its reported emissions and dramatically increased the use of recycled materials. Apple's latest reporting shows measurable progress rather than purely aspirational marketing.
But there is a legitimate case for saying that some of Apple's environmental marketing has been too ambitious or too easy for consumers to misunderstand.
The carbon-neutral Apple Watch claims are the clearest example. A German court found those claims misleading under German competition law, while separate US litigation has challenged the credibility of the carbon projects Apple used to support similar claims.
So rather than asking whether Apple is “green” or “greenwashing,” a better question is:
Are Apple's environmental claims proportional to the environmental progress it has actually achieved?
The answer appears to be sometimes yes, sometimes no.
Apple has earned credibility for making real changes to its products and supply chain. But the company also operates at enormous scale, continues to manufacture vast quantities of new electronics, and still has a long way to go before it reaches its 2030 target.
That tension is the real story.
Apple isn't simply greenwashing. Nor is it a sustainable technology company in any absolute sense. It is a company making substantial environmental improvements while still operating a fundamentally resource-intensive business — and some of its strongest environmental claims have deserved more scrutiny than its marketing initially suggested.
That makes the next question particularly important: even if Apple reduces its manufacturing emissions, how sustainable are its products if they're difficult to repair, expensive to fix or replaced every few years?
There is an uncomfortable contradiction at the centre of Apple's sustainability strategy.
On one hand, Apple wants to reduce the environmental impact of the materials and energy used to manufacture its products. On the other, the company makes its money by selling new devices.
That makes how long an Apple product remains useful just as important as how sustainably it was manufactured.
A device that lasts seven or eight years can spread its manufacturing footprint across a much longer period than one that needs to be replaced after three or four years. And if a broken battery, screen or charging port can be replaced rather than forcing someone to buy a new device, the environmental benefit can be significant.
So how does Apple perform on repairability and longevity?
The answer has improved — but it is still complicated.
Apple's relationship with independent repair has changed considerably in recent years.
In 2022, the company launched its Self Service Repair programme, giving customers and independent repair providers access to genuine Apple parts, tools and repair manuals for selected iPhone and Mac models. The programme has since expanded to cover additional products and markets.
Apple explains the programme through its Self Service Repair website, where it provides repair manuals, genuine parts and specialised tools for supported devices.
The company has also made hardware changes intended to make certain repairs easier.
Recent iPhone generations, for example, have included design changes that Apple says make repairs such as battery replacement easier than on some earlier models. Apple has also expanded access to parts and tools for independent repair shops.
These changes matter because repairability is a sustainability issue, not just a consumer-rights issue.
If a phone can be repaired for a reasonable price, the customer can keep using the existing device instead of generating demand for a replacement.
The reason Apple continues to face criticism is that many of its products have historically been difficult to repair.
The company has used highly integrated components, proprietary screws, adhesives and other design choices that can make repairs more complicated. Some replacement components have also required software configuration or parts pairing before the device will operate normally.
Independent repair organisation iFixit has documented many of these issues over the years, assigning repairability scores to Apple products and highlighting the practical challenges involved in replacing components.
The criticism isn't that Apple products cannot be repaired.
They can.
The issue is how difficult, expensive and accessible that repair is.
A phone can technically be repairable while still being economically disposable if replacing a component costs a large percentage of the price of a new device.
One of the most persistent criticisms of modern Apple hardware has involved parts pairing.
Certain components can be electronically associated with a particular device, meaning that replacing a component with a genuine part from another device may result in warnings, restricted functionality or the need for software configuration.
Apple has argued that such systems can be important for security, privacy and calibration.
Critics, however, argue that parts pairing can make independent repair more difficult and reduce the ability to reuse components from otherwise damaged devices.
Apple has taken steps to relax some of these restrictions.
In 2024, for example, the company announced that its repair processes would allow some used genuine parts to be reused in repairs, rather than requiring new components in every case. Apple described the move as a way to increase access to parts while reducing waste.
Its 2024 announcement on used parts is significant because it shows that Apple is not standing still on repairability.
But it also highlights how much influence Apple's own repair ecosystem still has over what can practically be repaired and reused.
Apple's repairability strategy also needs to be viewed in the context of changing regulation.
The European Union has increasingly moved toward right-to-repair and product-longevity requirements, putting pressure on manufacturers to make products easier to repair and keep in service.
The EU's right-to-repair rules are intended to make repair easier and more attractive for consumers, while encouraging manufacturers to design products with longer lifespans in mind.
This is particularly relevant to smartphones and other electronics, where the environmental impact of manufacturing is often far greater than the energy consumed while the device is being used.
Apple therefore isn't operating entirely on its own terms anymore.
Regulation is increasingly forcing the industry to think about what happens after the initial sale.
If Apple's repairability record is mixed, its record on software longevity is considerably easier to defend.
Apple has historically supported iPhones and other devices with software updates for many years. That allows customers to continue using older hardware long after it has stopped being commercially important to Apple.
Apple doesn't publish a single universal “X years of support” guarantee for every product, so claims about exact lifespans should be treated carefully. But in practice, older iPhones have continued receiving major iOS updates well beyond the typical replacement cycle for many consumers.
This matters environmentally.
The longer a device remains useful, the longer its original manufacturing emissions are effectively spread across its useful life.
A five-year-old iPhone that continues to perform adequately is environmentally preferable to a functioning phone being discarded simply because its manufacturer has stopped supporting it.
Batteries are one of the biggest practical limits on the lifespan of modern electronics.
Lithium-ion batteries naturally lose capacity over time. Eventually, a device may still work perfectly well but have a battery that no longer provides enough runtime for the owner's needs.
That makes battery replacement particularly important.
Apple provides battery replacement services for its products, and customers can use Apple's battery service options when battery capacity has deteriorated.
The environmental advantage is obvious: replacing a battery can potentially extend the useful life of an otherwise functional device.
But the economics matter.
If replacing a battery is expensive or inconvenient, some consumers will choose to replace the entire phone instead.
That is why repairability shouldn't be judged simply by whether Apple offers a repair service. The more useful question is:
Is repairing the device sufficiently affordable and convenient that an ordinary consumer will actually choose repair over replacement?
There is also a broader issue that repairability alone cannot solve.
Apple releases new iPhones, Macs, iPads and other devices every year, and its marketing encourages consumers to upgrade by emphasising improvements in cameras, processors, displays, batteries and artificial-intelligence features.
There is nothing inherently wrong with selling new technology.
But from an environmental perspective, the most sustainable upgrade is often the one that doesn't happen.
If a customer replaces a perfectly functional iPhone after two years, even a highly recyclable replacement still requires the extraction, processing and manufacturing of another set of materials.
This is why Apple's environmental strategy ultimately runs into a fundamental tension between circularity and consumption.
The company can make each generation of products more efficient and more recyclable while still increasing its total environmental impact if the number of devices manufactured and sold continues to rise rapidly.
This is particularly important because Apple itself identifies product manufacturing as the largest source of its emissions.
That means keeping existing devices in use for longer could potentially be one of the most effective ways to reduce the environmental impact associated with Apple's products.
Apple's Product Environmental Reports repeatedly show that the majority of a product's carbon footprint occurs during manufacturing rather than during the customer's everyday use.
That's why the distinction between “a greener new iPhone” and “using your existing iPhone for another two years” matters.
Apple can reduce the footprint of the first option.
The second option avoids much of the manufacturing footprint altogether.
I'd give Apple credit for moving in the right direction.
The Self Service Repair programme, increased availability of genuine parts, changes allowing the reuse of some used components and design improvements in newer devices represent meaningful changes from Apple's earlier approach.
But it would be premature to describe Apple as a leader in repairability across the board.
The company's hardware remains highly integrated, some repairs remain expensive or technically demanding, and Apple's control over parts, tools and software continues to give it considerable influence over the repair ecosystem.
The bigger issue is that repairability and sustainability aren't just about whether a repair is possible. They're about whether keeping an existing product alive is practical enough to compete with buying a new one.
Apple has made progress on that question.
It hasn't solved it.
And that leads to an uncomfortable conclusion: Apple could manufacture increasingly low-carbon products and still have a substantial environmental footprint if consumers continue replacing those products frequently.
That is why the environmental value of Apple's sustainability programme ultimately depends not only on what goes into each new device, but also on how long that device stays in someone's hands.
It would be easy to turn an article about Apple's sustainability claims into a catalogue of criticisms. That would also miss an important part of the story.
Apple is not simply talking about sustainability. The company has made substantial changes to its products, manufacturing requirements, materials and energy procurement, and some of those changes are measurable.
The question isn't whether Apple is doing anything meaningful.
It clearly is.
The more difficult question is whether those improvements are large enough to offset the environmental impact of Apple's enormous global business.
The strongest evidence in Apple's favour is its overall emissions reduction.
According to Apple's 2026 Environmental Progress Report, the company's greenhouse-gas emissions in 2025 were more than 60% below its 2015 baseline. Apple says its revenue increased by 78% over the same period.
That is important context.
Apple isn't claiming that its business has stopped producing emissions. It hasn't. Nor has it reached its 75% reduction target yet.
But reducing reported emissions by more than 60% while substantially increasing the size of the business is a meaningful achievement.
The fact that emissions remained roughly flat in 2025 compared with 2024 is worth watching, but it doesn't erase the much larger reduction achieved since 2015. Apple's own reporting says the next stage will be harder because the company is increasingly dealing with the more difficult sources of emissions in its supply chain.
Another genuine strength is Apple's ability to influence manufacturers outside the company itself.
Apple's suppliers had procured more than 20 gigawatts of renewable electricity by 2025, according to the company's latest environmental reporting. Apple estimates that this avoided more than 26 million metric tons of greenhouse-gas emissions during the year.
The important point isn't simply the number.
Apple is using its purchasing power to make environmental performance part of the relationship between itself and its suppliers.
That is potentially more significant than Apple making its own offices greener. Apple's corporate facilities are relatively small compared with the global manufacturing network required to produce its devices.
If Apple's requirements push suppliers to build renewable-energy capacity, improve energy efficiency and reduce industrial emissions, the effects can extend beyond Apple's own products.
Apple's recycled-material programme is another area where the company has made tangible progress.
Apple reported that 30% of the material in products shipped during 2025 came from recycled sources, the highest proportion it has reported so far. It also says it now uses 100% recycled cobalt in all batteries it designs and 100% recycled rare earth elements in all magnets.
Those figures don't make an iPhone or Mac environmentally harmless.
They do, however, demonstrate that Apple is moving beyond small sustainability experiments and changing the material composition of products at considerable scale.
The company's decision to eliminate plastic from its product packaging is another example. Apple says its products now ship in fibre-based packaging that can be recycled through normal household systems.
These changes are incremental rather than revolutionary, but at Apple's scale, incremental changes can have significant consequences.
Apple's investment in specialised recycling technology also deserves credit.
Its Daisy and Cora recycling systems are designed to recover materials from devices that might otherwise be difficult to process through conventional recycling systems. Apple says its recycling and waste programmes helped suppliers divert more than 600,000 metric tons of waste from landfill in 2025.
Again, recycling isn't a substitute for reducing production.
But recovering valuable materials from existing electronics is an important part of reducing dependence on virgin resources.
The longer-term opportunity is to create a system in which materials already present in the electronics economy can repeatedly circulate through new products instead of being continually extracted from the ground.
Apple hasn't created that circular economy yet.
But it is investing in some of the infrastructure required to move towards it.
There is a difference between saying:
“We want to be more sustainable.”
and saying:
“We will reduce our emissions by 75% from a defined baseline by 2030.”
Apple has chosen the second approach.
Its Apple 2030 plan sets a specific emissions baseline, a specific reduction target and a specific deadline. The company also publishes annual environmental progress reports showing where it believes it stands against those targets.
That doesn't make the company's methodology immune from criticism.
But it does make the claims more testable.
If Apple reaches 2030 having reduced its emissions by the promised amount, the progress can be evaluated against the baseline. If it doesn't, there will be a clear basis for criticism.
That accountability is valuable.
There is another reason Apple's environmental programme matters.
Apple is one of the most influential consumer technology companies in the world. When it changes its material requirements, packaging, energy requirements or manufacturing specifications, suppliers have a commercial reason to adapt.
That can create effects beyond Apple.
The company's environmental strategy therefore shouldn't be judged solely by the emissions associated with Apple's own corporate operations. Its ability to push suppliers toward renewable energy and recycled materials may be one of its most consequential contributions.
This doesn't mean Apple should receive credit for every environmental improvement made by its suppliers.
It means that corporate purchasing power can be a powerful mechanism for accelerating technological and industrial change.
There is an important distinction between saying Apple is making meaningful environmental improvements and saying Apple is a sustainable business.
Those are not the same thing.
Apple still depends on a huge global manufacturing system, substantial material extraction and the continual production of new electronic devices.
Even if every new iPhone is substantially less carbon intensive than the previous generation, manufacturing a new iPhone still has an environmental cost.
That is why the most convincing version of Apple's sustainability story isn't:
“Our products are green.”
It is:
“We are making the products we manufacture less environmentally damaging than they used to be.”
That is a much more defensible claim.
And based on the evidence available today, Apple has a reasonable case for making it.
Apple deserves credit for genuine progress.
Its reported emissions are substantially below its 2015 baseline. Its suppliers are using significantly more renewable electricity. Recycled materials are becoming a much larger part of its products. Its packaging is changing, and the company is investing in recycling and material recovery.
At the same time, those achievements don't eliminate the fundamental environmental cost of Apple's business.
The company still needs to reach its 75% emissions-reduction target, and its overall emissions did not fall further in 2025. Its carbon-removal strategy remains controversial, while questions around repairability, product longevity and the environmental consequences of continued hardware consumption remain unresolved.
So the fairest assessment isn't that Apple is either a sustainability leader or a greenwashing exercise.
It is doing both something genuinely impressive and something inherently contradictory: reducing the environmental impact of a business model that still depends on producing and selling enormous quantities of new hardware.
The question now is whether Apple can resolve that contradiction enough to meet its 2030 promise.
Apple has made substantial progress since it introduced its 2030 climate strategy. But with less than four years remaining until the deadline, the more useful question is no longer whether Apple is making progress.
It is whether the remaining progress is achievable at the required speed.
Apple says its greenhouse-gas emissions were more than 60% below its 2015 baseline in 2025, while its target requires a 75% reduction before the company addresses the remaining emissions through carbon removal.
On paper, that leaves a relatively small gap.
In practice, it may be the hardest part.
Apple has already addressed many of the most straightforward opportunities.
Its corporate operations have been powered by renewable electricity since 2018. Suppliers have rapidly expanded their renewable-energy procurement. Apple has increased recycled material in products and reduced the carbon intensity of some manufacturing processes.
The remaining emissions are increasingly concentrated in areas that are more difficult to decarbonise.
These include complex manufacturing processes, materials production, transportation and emissions from parts of Apple's global supply chain that cannot simply be eliminated by switching to renewable electricity.
That creates a familiar problem in climate policy: the first 50 or 60 percent of reductions can be much easier than the final 10 or 20 percent.
Apple itself acknowledges that reaching deeper reductions will require continued innovation across its supply chain and broader industry collaboration.
Apple's 2026 report provides an important reality check.
The company's emissions remained more than 60% below its 2015 baseline in 2025, but Apple says that reduction was essentially unchanged from 2024 despite significant business growth.
That isn't necessarily a failure.
A company can make progress in one year that doesn't immediately translate into a lower total footprint because of changes in production, accounting, business activity or the timing of major projects.
But it does mean we shouldn't assume the remaining reduction will happen automatically.
Apple now needs to demonstrate that it can restart the downward trajectory and move from roughly 60% to 75% without simply shifting an increasing share of its climate strategy onto carbon credits.
The most convincing scenario for Apple is relatively straightforward.
The company continues reducing manufacturing emissions, expands renewable electricity among suppliers, increases recycled and lower-carbon materials, improves energy efficiency and tackles difficult industrial emissions.
If Apple can reach the 75% reduction target through these measures, then using high-quality carbon removal for the genuinely unavoidable remainder becomes much more defensible.
That is broadly consistent with the hierarchy Apple itself describes in its 2026 Environmental Progress Report: reduce emissions first, then address the remaining footprint.
The less convincing scenario would be one in which direct reductions stall and carbon credits increasingly become necessary to maintain the appearance of progress.
That would make Apple's 2030 claim much more vulnerable to the criticisms we've already discussed.
Apple has several advantages that many companies don't.
It has enormous purchasing power, significant financial resources and considerable control over product design. It can therefore pressure suppliers, redesign components and invest in technologies that smaller companies may struggle to finance.
Its 2025 materials progress demonstrates what that scale can accomplish. Apple says 30% of the materials in products shipped that year came from recycled sources, while it reached 100% recycled cobalt in Apple-designed batteries and 100% recycled rare earth elements in magnets.
If the company applies the same level of investment and engineering effort to its remaining emissions, further reductions are certainly plausible.
Apple's target is ambitious precisely because the company has a huge and complicated footprint.
There is also an important difference between meeting a corporate climate target and creating genuinely sustainable consumption.
Apple could technically achieve its 2030 emissions target while consumers continue buying millions of new devices every year.
That wouldn't make the environmental problem disappear.
The better outcome would be a combination of lower-carbon manufacturing, more recycled materials, longer-lasting devices, better repairability, higher rates of refurbishment and responsible material recovery.
In other words, Apple needs to make each generation of hardware better without relying on consumers constantly buying the next generation.
That's a much harder challenge.
Based on the progress Apple has reported through 2025, I wouldn't call the 2030 target unrealistic.
Apple has already achieved more than 60% of the required emissions reduction, and it has demonstrated that it can influence suppliers and redesign products at enormous scale.
But I also wouldn't say the target is comfortably on track.
The fact that emissions were essentially flat in 2025 is a reminder that the remaining reductions won't necessarily come as easily as the earlier ones. Apple needs to maintain momentum over the next few years while dealing with the hardest parts of its supply chain.
So my verdict is:
Apple has a credible pathway to its 2030 target, but it hasn't earned the right to declare victory yet.
The next few environmental reports will be far more revealing than the original 2030 pledge.
If Apple's absolute emissions continue falling toward the 75% target while its business grows, the case for Apple as a genuine corporate climate leader will become much stronger.
If progress stalls and carbon removal becomes increasingly important to the headline claim, the criticism will become much harder to dismiss.
Apple is making genuine progress on sustainability, but calling the company completely “sustainable” would go too far.
Its emissions are now more than 60% below its 2015 baseline, while recycled materials, renewable energy and lower carbon manufacturing are becoming increasingly important across its products and supply chain. Those are meaningful achievements, particularly given Apple's enormous global footprint.
But the criticisms are valid too. Apple still depends on the continual production of new hardware, its products are not always as repairable as they could be, and its reliance on carbon removal creates legitimate questions about how some of its environmental claims should be interpreted.
So is Apple greenwashing?
Not really, but neither should we take Apple's green credentials at face value.
The fairest conclusion is that Apple is genuinely reducing its environmental impact while still operating a highly resource intensive business.
Its 2030 target will be the real test. If Apple can continue cutting emissions, increase product longevity and repairability, and reduce its reliance on carbon removal, it will have a much stronger claim to being a sustainability leader.
For now, Apple deserves credit for the progress it has made, but continued scrutiny is justified.
For consumers, however, the same principle applies: reducing environmental impact is usually less about one perfect product and more about the cumulative effect of everyday choices.
