This past Monday, Apple updated the company’s environmental website with data from the past year. Apparently the facility was awarded a LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council for its iCloud and Siri data center located in Maiden, North Carolina. This makes the Apple data center the only one of its size to have received such a certification.
Apple had this to say:
The facility has earned the coveted LEED Platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. We know of no other data center of comparable size that has achieved this level of LEED certification. Our goal is to run the Maiden facility with high percentage renewable energy mix, and we have major projects under way to achieve this — including building the nation’s largest end user-owned solar array and building the largest non-utility fuel cell installation in the United States.
With plans to power its facility with the largest non-utility fuel cell and user-owned solar farm in the U.S., Apple is well on its way to going “green.” Still, increased sales have caused Apple’s carbon footprint to increase by 56 percent from 14.8 million metric tons in 2010 to 23.1 million metric tons in 2011. But even with a bigger footprint, Apple still boasts that greenhouse gas emissions/dollar of revenue have decreased by 15.4 percent since 2008. This is attributed to the increased usage of “environmentally conscious materials” like re-polymerized plastic bottles in fan assemblies, recycled plastic in speaker assembles and internal brackets, recycled paper in its packaging, and renewable tapioca paper foam in iPhone packages.Well done, Apple. Well done.
