Executive summary
At Apple, we have a long history of leading in the removal of potentially harmful substances. This means
proactively restricting hazardous substances and using safer materials in Apple products and
manufacturing processes to ensure the well-being of our employees, our customers, people in our supply
chain, and the planet, while driving change that goes beyond what is required for regulatory compliance.
We’ve done sosince the late 1990s, rigorously assessing chemicals and removing those that don’t align
with our goals, such as replacing PVC with safer thermoplastic elastomers and eliminating brominated
flame retardants from thousands of enclosures, cables, circuit boards, and connectors. As part of our long-
standing commitment to design products that are better for the environment and for people, we’re releasing
this white paper to detail our commitment to phase out our use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances
(PFAS). As part of this effort, we plan to engage all of our supply chain partners to restrict PFAS from our
products and manufacturing processes and to develop safer alternatives that not only maintain, but may
even enhance, the performance of Apple products.
The environmental implications of the use of PFAS are significant, and we’re responding with focus and
dedication. We want to thoughtfully phase out PFAS in a way that does not result in regrettable substitutions.
We’re prioritizing our phaseout activities on applications that result in the highest volumes of PFAS
reductions and the most meaningful environmental impact. It will take time for Apple to completely phase
out PFAS from our products and processes because of the challenges related to compiling a
comprehensive catalog of PFAS use, identifying and developing non-PFAS alternatives that can meet the
performance needs for certain critical applications, and taking into account the time needed for material
qualification. This paper details our plan to phase out PFAS from our products.
Introduction
Apple has led the industry in removing harmful substances from our product designs, and we go to great
lengths to make sure these substances stay out of our products.We’ve built an infrastructure to do
thiswork, including the rigorous requirements defined in our Regulated Substances Specification (RSS),
which describes Apple’s global restrictions on the use of many chemical substances or materials in Apple
products, accessories, manufacturing processes, and packaging used for shipping products to Apple’s
endcustomers. To find a replacement for PVC and phthalates, for example, we and our suppliers invested in
four years of research and development to create power cords and headphone cables that had both the
performance and the chemistry that met Apple standards. This deep commitment to safer chemistries led
us to innovate new solutions, while other companies are still using PVC and phthalates in their cables.
We are proud and humbled to report that our work to develop and use safer chemicals in our products
hasbeen recognized. Apple has received the #1 rank and an A+ rating from Mind the Store, an external
campaign that evaluates the largest retailers in North America on how they ensure the chemical safety of
their products and packaging, for the past three years. In 2021, for the second year in a row, we received
the EPA Safer Choice Partner of the Year Award, recognizing our work to scale the use of safer process
chemicals and protect those working in our supply chain. Apple was the first consumer electronics
company to receive this recognition.
Our commitment to creating the highest-quality products that are also better for the environment and for
people requires diligent work, beginning with collecting comprehensive chemical composition information
for the substances used to make our products, as well as the process chemicals. We do this in several
ways. First, our Full Material Disclosure (FMD) program, which was launched in 2016, maps the chemicals in
the materials used in our products. In addition to understanding our product chemistry, our Chemical Safety
Disclosure (CSD) program advances disclosure around the chemistries used in manufacturing processes