JOLLY GREEN GIANTS?

Are huge gadget firms with huge profits doing enough to prevent the depletion of natural resources?

Apple has disassembly robots called Daisy and Dave (somehow it’s always Dave) working in a lab in Texas to remove components, rare-earth elements and other materials from old gadgets that it can reuse in new devices. Nice, but is this just an expensive marketing ploy?

Well, we told you on p36 that America’s top five most responsible companies were all tech firms – step forward

HP, Nvidia, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Qualcomm. Apple comes 44th on that list, which is a big leap from last year’s score of 259th; but order that list by environmental score and it shoots up to seventh.

With Samsung now sticking solar panels on its TV remotes (see p29), it does start to feel like the movement has finally begun.