Steve Jobs has released anopen letter to customers, shareholders and employees. In the statement Steve Jobs admitted that Apple was failing its environmental policy and then outlined a timetable for the removal of toxic chemicals from the companies products.
"Apple has been criticized by some environmental organizations for not being a leader in removing toxic chemicals from its new products, and for not aggressively or properly recycling its old products," said Jobs. "Upon investigating Apple’s current practices and progress towards these goals, I was surprised to learn that in many cases Apple is ahead of, or will soon be ahead of, most of its competitors in these areas."
"Our stakeholders deserve and expect more from us, and they’re right to do so," wrote Jobs. "They want us to be a leader in this area, just as we are in the other areas of our business. So today we’re changing our policy."
As part of the new plans Apple intends to stop using arsenic in its displays by the end of 2008 and transition to using LED backlighting to eliminate the use of mercury.
"To eliminate mercury in our displays, we need to transition from fluorescent lamps to light-emitting diodes (LEDs) to illuminate the displays. Fortunately, all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination, and therefore contain no mercury. We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Our ability to completely eliminate fluorescent lamps in all of our displays depends on how fast the LCD industry can transition to LED backlighting for larger displays."