The Green Apple: How Does The Tech Giant's Net Zero Pledge Look Today?

Introduction

This report is created for Maven Analytics' Environmental Challenge, where participants were tasked to work as independent journalists and data visualization enthusiasts to showcase Apple's progress toward achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.

Dataset

All of the data used in this challenge were provided by Maven Analytics. It comprised 3 CSV tables, namely: Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Carbon Footprint by Product, and Normalizing Factors.

Layout

The main focus of this infographic is to demonstrate Apple's progress in achieving its 2030 carbon neutrality pledge. To align with the environmental theme of the challenge, I've chosen a color scheme inspired by nature: green, blue, yellow, and gray.

Analysis

I decided to focus solely on Apple's greenhouse gas emissions and carbon removals both on its corporate operations and product lifecycle. My goal was to determine if the amount of it increased or decreased since the company made its pledge in 2020.

Furthermore, I adopted a top-down approach (starting from greenhouse gas emissions to carbon footprint by product) to provide a more granular analysis of how Apple's product lifecycle emissions look like.

Greenhouse Gas Net Emissions:

I was able to discover that Apple's net emissions is mostly comprised of emissions from its product lifecycle. I used a stacked column chart to visualize this insight in order to give the audience a clearer view of the volume and trend of the emissions.

On the other hand, I also wanted to forecast Apple's future emissions by providing estimates or projections for the company's net emissions in the future. I used Microsoft Excel's forecasting features to provide this analysis.

And to dig deeper, I decided to also visualize the company's carbon removals since 2015, and evaluate whether these carbon removals will result in carbon neutrality in 2030 using the projected emissions.

Carbon Footprint By Product:

This analysis was simply a comparison of the carbon footprint Apple's iPhone product series produce since 2015. I used the standard column chart to visualize this part of the infographic to provide the audience a simple yet insightful comparison of the products.

I added each product's actual photos to make this part more appealing.

Note:

I only used the free version of Power BI desktop and do not have the access to publish the report online.