Apple has run its offices, shops and data centres on renewable electricity since 2018, and has offset the rest of its corporate emissions with carbon credits since April 2020.
The asterisk is in the word “corporate”. The products are 96% of Apple’s footprint and sit outside the claim. Their batteries need cobalt. An estimated 73% of the world’s mined cobalt came from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2025, where Amnesty International has documented child labour in mines, and Apple says the batteries it designs now use only recycled cobalt.
Apple is also the second largest company in the S&P 500, so almost anyone with an index fund or a default super option already owns a piece of it.
the part that holds up
Apple’s 2026 Environmental Progress Report, covering its financial year to September 2025, says it moved its offices, retail stores and data centres, Apple Park included, to 100% renewable electricity in 2018 and “first achieved carbon neutrality for our corporate emissions in 2020”. The emissions that remain, mainly business travel and staff commuting, came to 570,100 tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2025. Apple retired carbon credits for all of them.
The same report puts emissions across the whole business down more than 60% since 2015, with more than 20 gigawatts of renewable energy online at suppliers and a record 30% of product materials from recycled sources. Its Daisy robot takes apart 36 models of iPhone for recycling.
the asterisk
The 2020 claim covers Apple’s stores, offices and data centres, plus things like business travel and commuting. It leaves out the products. Apple counts those “from sourcing materials to end of life”, and its annual report says a “significant majority” of its manufacturing is done by outsourcing partners.
In the environment report’s breakdown for 2025 the whole footprint was 15.3 million tonnes. Corporate emissions were about 4% of it. Making the products was 53%, customers using them 27% and transporting them 16%.
Apple’s own date for the whole footprint is 2030. It did sell some Apple Watch models as carbon neutral from 2023. A German court ruled in August 2025 that it could not use that label, and Apple said the court had “broadly upheld” its approach. A US lawsuit over the label and the 2020 claim was dismissed in February 2026.
the cobalt and the lithium
iPhone batteries are lithium-ion, and Apple says the batteries it designs account for “a significant majority” of the cobalt it uses. The US Geological Survey’s Mineral Commodity Summaries estimate that the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) produced 73% of the world’s mined cobalt in 2025.
In January 2016 Amnesty International and Afrewatch published This is what we die for. It traced cobalt from mines in southern DRC, where children as young as seven worked, to battery makers who said they supplied Apple, and cited a UNICEF estimate of about 40,000 children in the region’s mines in 2014. Amnesty said Apple and other brands were “failing to do basic checks”.
Amnesty returned in November 2017 with Time to Recharge, rating 29 companies. It said Apple was “the first company to publish the names of its cobalt suppliers” and the industry leader, “but the bar is low”. Because Apple had not published its assessment of the risks at each smelter, Amnesty said, it was “impossible to say” whether it was meeting its human rights responsibilities. Apple disputed part of its rating.
Apple says it maps its supply chain “to the smelter and refiner level and, to the extent available, to the mining level”. It publishes its cobalt and lithium refiners each year and says all of them are independently audited.
The audits are of refiners. The child labour Amnesty documented was at the mines.
The bigger change came later. Apple’s 2026 report says every battery it designs now uses 100% recycled cobalt, and that 95% of the cobalt and more than 90% of the lithium in the products it shipped in 2025 were recycled. In 2022, by Apple’s count, the cobalt figure was a quarter.
the upgrade cycle
The Global E-waste Monitor, from two UN bodies, counts the world’s e-waste from every maker.
In December 2017 Apple confirmed that a software update had slowed some older iPhones as their batteries aged, which it says prevents unexpected shutdowns. In 2020 it agreed to pay up to US$500 million to settle a US class action, denying wrongdoing, and US$113 million to California and 33 other states, which alleged it had misrepresented the updates.
iFixit scored the iPhone 16 at 7 out of 10 for repairability in 2024, calling it “the most repairable iPhone in years”.
the factory floor
Foxconn assembles iPhones for Apple. In 2010 workers at its Longhua plant in Shenzhen began taking their own lives: an account in The Guardian counts 18 reported attempts and 14 deaths that year. Foxconn installed nets outside many of its buildings and hired counsellors.
If any of this is close to home, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Kids Helpline is on 1800 55 1800, any time.
In October 2022, during a Covid lockdown at its Zhengzhou plant, where Reuters reported about 200,000 people worked, some workers climbed the fences and walked home. A month later videos showed hundreds confronting police over pay and Covid controls. Foxconn apologised for a “technical error” in pay.
Apple’s 2026 supply chain report says it caps supplier working weeks at 60 hours, and that in 2025 it found its most serious class of breach at three sites, two of them for falsified working hours.
the tax geography
In August 2016 the European Commission decided that Ireland had given Apple illegal tax benefits worth up to €13 billion. Irish tax rulings let Apple Sales International, which recorded Apple’s sales across Europe, assign almost all its profit to a head office the Commission said existed only on paper.
Apple and Ireland appealed, and a lower EU court agreed with them in 2020. On 10 September 2024 the Court of Justice set that aside and gave final judgment for the Commission. Apple said “there has never been a special deal”. The escrow fund set up in 2018 paid Ireland about €14.2 billion before it closed in May 2025.
Apple’s annual report gives an effective tax rate of 15.6% for its 2025 financial year, against a US federal rate of 21%.
the size of it
Apple was worth about US$4.9 trillion in early October 2026, second in the world to Nvidia. It reported US$416.2 billion in sales and US$112.0 billion in net income for its 2025 financial year, and in January 2026 counted more than 2.5 billion active devices. On 2 October 2026 it was 7.32% of the S&P 500, again second to Nvidia.
hold on to this one
what you are holding without choosing it
About seven cents in every dollar of an S&P 500 tracker is this one company. The index weights by market value and takes no account of cobalt, Zhengzhou or Dublin.
what this means for your money
If you own an index fund or a super fund that tracks the market, you almost certainly own Apple. That holding comes with the renewable electricity and the recycled cobalt. It also comes with the footprint outside the carbon neutral claim, the factory record and the tax history.
inaam holds itself to the same reading. Every company in the fund is named in the app, with the reason it got in and the trade-off written next to it. The three checks a company has to pass are set out on how it works, and the five themes members customise for themselves are on investment areas. The subscription is $10 a month, which is $120 a year, and it is separate from the money you invest. The minimum to invest in the fund is $100. Sign-up happens in the app, not on this website. SMSFs and family trusts are welcome.
key sources
Apple’s 2026 Environmental Progress Report · US Geological Survey · Amnesty International · European Commission · Court of Justice of the EU · the Global E-waste Monitor
General information only. It does not take your objectives or circumstances into account. Consider the PDS and TMD, and we recommend independent advice, before investing. This article is general information only and does not constitute financial advice. Readers should do their own research before making investment decisions. inaam Impact Investments Pty Ltd ABN 39 653 593 018 produced it, and the inaam Impact Investments Fund is ARSN 691 614 132. inaam is not affiliated with Apple Inc., Foxconn, or any entity discussed in this report.
