Apple’s chief executive, Steve Jobs, announced the company’s plan to educated devoted customers, shareholders, employees, and the public about the changes being made to its environmental policy.

In doing so, Jobs acknowledged that in the past the company had not been forthright on its policy because of the long standing strategy to keep all of its business operations somewhat secret. “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 about his reasoning for discussing the topic.

The new aspects of Apple’s environmental policy includes eliminating the use of arsenic in its display screens by the end of 2008, in addition to removing the the use of mercury by changing all of its Mac computer displays to LED back lighting sometime in 2007. That change will largely depend on when the LCD industry can transition to LED back lighting for bigger displays. Jobs added that all iPod displays already use LEDs for illumination and contain no mercury.

Jobs also touched on the subject of recycling, and stated that Apply has been recycling since 1994 and such programs are enforced at nearly 82% of all retailers where Mac’s and iPods are sold. The company plans by the end of the year to have that percentage up to 93%. Apple has a similar recycling plan to one of its larger competitors, Dell, which is assuming a seven year product lifetime and measure the percentage of the total weight a company recycles each year compared to the total weight of what it sold seven years earlier.

During the 2006 calendar year, Apple recycled more than 13 million pounds of e-waste, which is 9.5 percent of the weight of all products sold seven years prior. The company plans to have that percentage grow to about 13 percent by the end of 2007, and by 2010 that percentage should rise to 30 percent, which is equal to more than 19 million pounds of e-waste.

Jobs was quick to point out that while environmental organizations claimed that Apple’s environmental practices were below the standards of other competitors such as HP and Dell, that in fact Apple is either ahead of or is soon to be ahead of its competitors regarding various issues. Jobs said that other companies were only considered to be higher up on the environmental safety checklist because of their willingness to make policy’s known to the public, while Apple kept the issues within the company. He continued to point out that currently both HP and Dell are recycling about 10 percent of its e-waste but have not disclosed any plans to grow that percentage in the future.

Jobs ended his discussion by promising to keep all parties involved up to date on Apple’s environmental policy changes and progress. He stated, “Apple is already a leader in innovation and engineering, and we are applying these same talents to become an environmental leader. Based on our tangible actions and results over time, hopefully our customers, employees, shareholders and professional colleagues will all feel proud of our ongoing efforts to become a greener Apple.”

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