Apple’s recent efforts to trumpet its green initiatives largely have been about supply chain and manufacturing, but last Thursday the company unveiled a splashy initiative aimed at its millions of customers.
The company is rolling out “Apps for Earth,” in which the App Store will, for 10 days, feature 27 popular apps — including Angry Birds 2, Jurassic World: The Game and SimCity BuildIt — that have added new environmental content for Earth Day.
Money spent buying one of these 27 apps, or making purchases within them, will then support the World Wildlife Fund, to help advance environmental initiatives. And given the size of the App store itself, which has many millions of users across 155 countries, and the huge reach of some of the apps (Angry Birds 2 has been downloaded 85 million times, for instance), it might be one of the corporate world’s farthest-reaching green initiatives.
Apple, the world’s largest company by market capitalization, has been unveiling a series of high-profile green initiatives. In March at the company’s latest special event, Lisa Jackson, former EPA director and now Apple’s vice president for environment, policy, and social initiatives, announced 93 percent of the company’s global facilities are powered by renewable energy.
But at a time when it’s hard to make people pay attention to the environment, Apple is creating a gigantic new megaphone. “This is yet another example of our work to help the planet, and it addresses something we hear a lot of from our customers,” Jackson said. “They love the work Apple is doing as a company, but they want to be engaged in this mission of leaving the planet better than we found it.”
