Apple plans to offer free recycling to its E-wastes

Apple is offering free recycling of all its used products and vowing to power all of its stores, offices and data centers with renewable energy to reduce the pollution caused by its devices and online services.

Apple had already been distributing gift cards at some of its 420 worldwide stores in exchange for iPhones and iPods still in good enough condition to be resold. Now, all of the company's stores will recycle any Apple product at no charge. Gift cards won't be handed out for recycled products deemed to have little or no resale value.

 The offer covers a wide array of electronics that aren't supposed to be dumped in landfills because of the toxins in them. In the past seven years alone, Apple has sold more than 1 billion iPhones, iPods, iPads and Mac computers.

The new initiative, timed to coincide with Tuesday's annual celebration of Earth Day, strives to position Apple as an environmental steward amid the technological whirlwind of gadgets and Internet services that have been drawing more electricity from power plants that primarily run on natural gas and coal.

Technology products and services accounted for about 2 percent of worldwide emissions in 2012, roughly the same as the airline industry, according to statistics cited by environmental protection group Greenpeace in a report released earlier this month. Some of biggest electricity demands come from huge data centers that house the stacks of computers that process search requests, store photos and email and stream video.

As the world's largest technology company, Apple is trying to hatch more environmental solutions than problems.

"What the company wants to do is use all our innovation and all of our expertise to make the planet more secure and make the environment better," Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environmental initiatives, said in a Monday interview. Jackson ran the Environmental Protection Agency under President Barack Obama before joining Apple last June.