Apple is following through on its commitment to sustainability with a new partnership announced today between the company and the World Wildlife Fund. The deal will put the WWF in charge of managing as much as 1 million acres of forest in China as Apple works to achieve a net zero impact on the environment for all of the virgin paper products that it uses.
The move is similar to Apple’s recently announced partnership with The Conservation Fund, which put that organization in charge of managing 36,000 acres of forest in the U.S. designed to help offset the company’s virgin paper impact. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives, said in a press release announcing the deal that Apple’s goal is to “leave the world better than we found it.”
The news comes three weeks after Apple began work on a solar farm in Sichuan Province that will provide renewable energy to all of the company’s offices and retail stores in China. That still doesn’t cover the entire environmental impact of Apple’s business in China, since the company also runs most of its manufacturing out of factories in the country.
To top it all off, Apple CEO Tim Cook now has a verified account on Weibo, China’s Twitter-esque microblogging service. The Apple CEO Already has Twitter and Facebook accounts, but both are officially banned in the Middle Kingdom, which is why it makes sense for him to have yet another social networking account.
