Apple Inc pledged to increase efforts to monitor the environmental practices of its suppliers in China, according to activists who said they met with officials from the company this week.
“The company told us that it had not given sufficient guidance to suppliers on environmental issues in the past,” Li Li, a director at -Beijing-based group Envirofriends who attended a Tuesday meeting with Apple officials in the Chinese capital, said by telephone yesterday.
The California-based company had hired an independent firm and started to audit its suppliers in China, she said without naming any manufacturers.
Apple’s spokesperson in Beijing Carolyn Wu said the company required suppliers to use “environmentally responsible -manufacturing processes.”
Pollution caused by suppliers making Apple’s products in China “greatly endangers” public health and safety, according to an August report by the Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs, a Beijing-based group. Apple’s own audits last year found that 80 suppliers’ facilities were not storing or handling hazardous chemicals properly, a company report said.
“Apple told us at the meeting that its efforts on the environment were inadequate and it committed to improve,” said Feng Yongfeng, a researcher at Beijing-based Green Beagle, who also attended the meeting.
Suppliers could be terminated if they fail to correct offenses identified in the audit within 12 months, Apple said, according to Feng.
Taiwanese metal-casing maker Catcher Technology Co (可成科技), one of Apple’s supply-chain companies, announced last month that it would partially shutdown its factories in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, after local authorities ordered the company to improve its manufacturing process in light of residents’ complaints about the strange odors emitted by its factories.
Meanwhile, China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV last month ran an investigative report that said 27 companies in Apple’s supply chain have contributed to pollution in China. It accused Apple of turning a blind eye to its suppliers’ behavior.
Separately, Mattel Inc, the world’s biggest toymaker, -is -investigating China Labor Watch’s report of violations at two suppliers’ factories in China and said an initial review showed “many of the allegations are unfounded.”
Legal and ethical violations were found at two factories making toys for Mattel in southern China, according to a statement on the Web site of New York-based China Labor Watch on Wednesday.
Employees at the suppliers’ factories “work under unsafe and exploitative conditions that violate numerous tenets of Chinese law,” the statement said.
“Mattel takes allegations such as these seriously and has already begun to investigate the claims,” California-based Mattel said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last