Apple Environmental Responsibility Report

8 billion
Since our Clean Water Program began,
we’ve helped our suppliers save more
than 8 billion gallons of water—enough
to provide every person on the planet
with 18 glasses of water.
The vast majority of our product water footprint is found in manufacturing,
so in 2013 we established the supplier Clean Water Program to help our
partners conserve water and prevent water pollution. We put a special
emphasis on working with suppliers with high water usage and in water
scarce regions, as well as makers of components that our life cycle water
assessments have identified as particularly water-intensive. These
life cycle assessments include water that’s consumed in energy production—
such as for oil extraction, distillation, and processing—as well as nonenergy
sources including water consumed during metals processing and
product recycling. Through employee training, baseline assessments,
performance evaluations, and technical support, we helped our suppliers
conserve more than 3 billion gallons of water in 2016 alone, increasing
average water reuse to 36 percent across 86 sites. And since many of our
suppliers also build components for other companies, we’re reducing the
water footprint of non-Apple products too.
How we think about water.
The impact of water use varies significantly depending on the watershed
conditions where the water is being used. So we’ve continued to look
at more sophisticated ways to measure and analyze our water use. The
way we manage water is different based on the climate and nature of our
operations across our facilities, whether it’s our data centers, corporate
offices, manufacturing sites, or retail stores. We map our global water
use against scarcity indicators. This analysis helps us prioritize our
conservation efforts across our operations.
We mapped our water use to different
levels of water risk (as defined by
WRI’s Aqueduct tool) across the world
to understand where we should be
focusing our conservation efforts. Water
risk takes into consideration indicators
such as water scarcity, business risk,
and habitat and livelihood impact to the
basins in which we operate.
Source: World Resources Institute (WRI) Aqueduct,
www.wri.org/our-work/project/aqueduct
Corporate water use by level of risk (FY2016)
Millions of gallons
250
200
150
100
50
Low
Low-Medium
Medium-High
High
0
Data Centers
Corporate Offices
Retail Stores
Environmental Responsibility Report | 2017 Progress Report, Covering FY2016
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