What you need to know
- Apple has released its annual progress report for supplier responsibility.
- The report touches on supplier responsibility, labor and human rights, and more.
Apple has released its People and Environment in Our Supply Chain 2021 Annual Progress Report.
The report opens up with a quote from Apple CEO Tim Cook:
"Apple is a technology company, but we never forget that the devices we make are imagined by human minds, built by human hands, and are meant to improve human lives."
It then jumps into a letter written by Sabih Khan, Apple's Senior Vice President of Operations who leads the company's global supply chain. The letter talks about how the company and its partners adapted during the pandemic and also touched on the progress made in rights training, education, and skill-building for workers across the supply chain as well as the environmental progress made.
Adapting to COVID-19 was an all-hands-on-deck effort, but it didn't distract us from making strides in all our long-standing work to support and empower the people in our supply chain. In 2020, our teams conducted 1,121 supplier assessments in 53 countries to ensure compliance with our Code of Conduct. And as of this year, more than 21 million supplier employees have received rights trainings, and we've reached 4.6 million with education, skill- building and enrichment courses. We also pushed forward in our work to prevent debt-bonded labor — mapping the labor agencies that support our suppliers, and providing resources and trainings through the Responsible Labor Recruitment Toolkit we developed in partnership with the United Nation's International Organization for Migration. Apple has zero tolerance for forced labor, and we look for evidence of it in every assessment we conduct. Those assessments continued through the COVID- 19 pandemic — along with interviews of supplier employees and independent audits — and found no evidence of involuntary labor on any Apple production lines. And in all our work, we continued to set and enforce the highest standards for labor and human rights, health and safety in the workplace, and environmental protection.Last year, we also made landmark progress in our environmental work, becoming carbon neutral as a company and pledging to do the same across our supply chain and for the lifetime use of our products. To date, more than 110 of our suppliers, across industries and around the world, have committed to transitioning to 100% renewable energy for all their Apple manufacturing. Even as we've led the industry in responsible mineral sourcing, new innovations in recycled and renewable materials continue to move us closer to our goal of one day making our products without taking resources from the earth. We've made great progress toward that goal, with all our suppliers' final assembly sites for key products having achieved 100% zero waste certification.
You can check out the entire report on Apple's website.
