Chinese Apple suppliers face toxic heavy metal water pollution charges Chinese environmental regulators have launched an investigation into two Apple suppliers – one being the giant iDevice assembler Foxconn – in response to allegations that the companies' factories are using nearby rivers as dumping grounds for huge amounts of toxic heavy metals. "If you're severely exceeding emissions standards …
Apple is mentioned but who else?
We really deserve to know so the we, the readership can make informed purchasing decisions.
IT is not use continually mentioning only APPLE in these articles. We know that Foxconn make stuff for lots of other companies.
We also need to know if the stuff that Foxconn makes for say Apple uses materieals whoose by-products have been found to have been dumped.
I know that this may sound silly but this endless slagging off of only Apple is getting quite tiring and frankly boring as hell.
No more half stories please?
With all these negatives from Foxconn, Apple needs to work on their image -a lot!
Since Foxconn is going to roboticise away it's workforce. This might be a good time for Apple to move manufacturing back to robot factories in the US, where the higher standards will protect their name.
Maybe the Feds will give them a tax break on all that foreign cash if they do that?!!?
In fairness to Apple (and there's no particular reason why I should be - though I do like my Mac), they audit their suppliers and publish the results. How many other companies which use Foxconn and/or UniMicron can say the same?
My favourite sentence from the 2013 report notes that one supplier was found to be "intentionally dumping waste cutting oil into the restroom receptacle". I assume this means they were pouring it down the bog and flushing it away. This supplier is now on probation.
http://www.apple.com/supplierresponsibility/pdf/Apple_SR_2013_Progress_Report.pdf
Face it, ALL manufacturers in the area are probably evading every environmental regulation they possibly can, and the only reason that these two get singled out is for the publicity that goes with them being Apple related. It makes it look like something is being done, and with activists involved you'd NEVER suspect that this might just be a publicity ploy, would you.
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