Apple’s position since the story broke has been that it follows plenty of other green standards, which it does lay out clearly on its website. But the reaction from the City of SF provoked a longer statement from Apple on Tuesday, essentially repeating the same idea, but in more detail. For Apple’s thoughts, see The Loop.

It’s very true that Apple has made an effort to keep dangerous chemicals out of its products. And that is likely satisfactory to a lot of individual consumers. But that doesn’t address the recycling question. The move signals that future MacBooks that won’t be EPEAT certified — therefore will not be as recyclable by individuals — and will theoretically still end up in a landfill some day. And e-waste is e-waste — it still needs to be dealt with. More crucially for businesses, Apple’s statement doesn’t address the standards issue, which government purchasing departments and corporate IT buyers still have to adhere to — many are required to buy EPEAT-certified computers.

So what is Apple up to? Well, the company might actually be cooking up a solution by contributing to a future recycling standard that is more up to date. The Green Electronics Council that administers EPEAT certification said that it’s been trying to update its standards to fit how today’s electronics are manufactured. The group’s spokeswoman told Fortune that a group including Apple has “just delivered reports on a number of preliminary questions which will inform the IEEE 1680.1 standard refresh process, expected to launch shortly.”

Does this mean Apple will buy back into EPEAT if a new standard fits its design priorities and environmental goals? I guess we’ll have to see.

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Last month Apple asked that the standards group EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool), which is responsible for rating the recyclability of electronics products drop it from its rankings. The group, which is funded by the EPA, complied. It means that 39 Macs, MacBooks and monitors that were previously EPEAT certified as causing minimal environmental damage and promoting maximum recyclability, no longer have the group’s stamp of approval. In making this move, Apple is signaling that it won’t let future design decisions be governed by those seeking to uphold environmental standards.

The head of EPEAT, CEO Robert Frisbee, told the Wall Street Journal about Apple’s decision that’s sure to rile the environmentally conscious:

“They said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.”

The “green” angle is one Apple has taken flack for over the years. Since 2007, Apple has spent time repairing its reputation with Greenpeace and other environmental groups, and has become vocal about the “green” nature of its products. And it’s still a target, most recently for its use of coal power. Now it appears to be going backward, withdrawing requests for EPEAT certification.

But will mainstream consumers, Apple’s target audience, care? I think plenty will not. To be perfectly clear, I’m not saying people shouldn’t care, I just think a lot won’t.

Apple can still claim it is thinking about the environmental impact of its products in other ways. The company is still happy to brag about how its MacBook battery lasts three times as long as competitors’ notebook batteries, as well as all the PVC and BFR it keeps out of its products and how green it has made its data centers. But do its solar- and fuel-cell powered data centers weigh heavily on whether a customer chooses to use iTunes or iCloud? Unlikely. Which is why I doubt EPEAT labels have a sizable impact on the decision for the average buyer when shopping for a new notebook.

A lot of us are already aware how difficult it is to take apart Apple products. Sites like iFixit have been vocal about how difficult it is to disassemble and self-repair the latest MacBooks, as well as the iPad and iPhone. Still, plenty continue to buy these products. The ability to take apart a MacBook and recycle the battery, for instance, and the ability to replace the battery without the need for special tools clearly go somewhat hand in hand. Apple has trained customers to expect a product that lasts a decently long amount of time, and if it’s damaged beyond repair and can’t be salvaged by the company’s own specialists, to buy a new one.

Still, Apple won’t escape completely unscathed. People with high standards for their consumer products will care about EPEAT rankings, and they’ll seek out more easily recyclable computers. Big institutions will care too. The federal government, schools, Ford and Kaiser Permanente, for example, as the WSJ points out, each have requirements to buy EPEAT-certified electronics. That’s a lot of spending power on computers for workers, and Apple computers will no longer meet those IT departments’ buying standards.

And that could hurt. But it’s also consistent with most Apple decisions: it spends a lot of money, stays out of some markets and probably loses out on some easy profits because design always comes first.

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The Exhilarate debuts on June 10 at $49 with contract, which is relatively low for an LTE-capable device. It looks like others in the Samsung Galaxy line of handsets and uses a 1.2 GHz dual-core Qualcomm Scorpion processor. That’s a bit of a recycle as well: Scorpion is the predecessor to this year’s Snapdragon chips. A 4-inch SuperAMOLED display, 5 megapixel camera with 720p video recording and 1.3 megapixel front camera round out the currently known specifications, as shown by AT&T in this video:

AT&T says this phone will one of of the first to go through a new AT&T eco-rating system, coming later this summer. The Exhilarate looks capable and is certainly inexpensive from an up-front investment. It should appeal to the eco-conscious, and could even move off the shelves to first-time smartphone buyers that don’t want to spend much cash for their hardware in order to get on board the Android train with an LTE connection.

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We live in a world dominated by AC, or alternating current, for electric transmission. But a lot of equipment, like servers and electric motors run on DC. Batteries use DC and solar panels produce DC power, too. These types of devices usually have converters attached to them that convert the AC grid power to DC for the device, and vice versa.

For years data center operators and power companies have talked about how DC data centers would be able to run more efficiently, with less energy lost in conversions, and with less space used. All of those factors mean money can be saved. But now DC seems like it’s really starting to crack the data center market.

ABB says that it expects its DC power data center business to grow by 20 to 25 percent annually. ABB acquired controlling interest — through its venture arm (ABB Technology Ventures) — in DC data center company Validus DC Systems last year.

ABB says that costs for building and operating data centers can be lowered by 15 percent using DC technology. Green’s data center is 10 percent more efficient than a traditional AC data center, and has 15 percent lower energy costs, says ABB. The Green data center uses DC-capable HP servers.

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Portion of LinkedIn's Infographic (click to enlarge)

On Monday, LinkedIn released new stats about its membership growth, showing that the small business sector is a major player in the larger professional landscape. More than 4.7 million of LinkedIn’s members work for small businesses, according to an infographic published by the company.

And while green startups may have gone through some tough times recently, LinkedIn has seen a major uptick in members who work for small businesses in the industry. From 2009 to 2011, “renewables and environment” was the fastest growing sector within the small business landscape on LinkedIn, with the number of LinkedIn members in the space growing 29 percent in that timeframe. Interestingly, the second-fastest small business growth sector on LinkedIn was “oil and energy,” which grew by 20 percent from 2009 to 2011.

That greentech growth could just add credence to talk that the sector is ripe for a shakeout. But, as my colleague Katie Fehrenbacher wrote recently, there’s still a lot of progress that can be made in the space — if the right people put their minds to it.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Simon Peckham

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In Jeff’s column on GigaOM Pro this week (subscription required), he looks into the benefits of using 6LoWPAN for an end-to-end smart grid network, from home energy devices to a wider neighborhood smart meter management system. In fact, if NXP and Cisco started working on integrating somehow, 6LoWPAN would take an important step forward, effectively competing with home wireless leader WiFi and the utility-leading home wireless standard ZigBee.

Whatever the dominant home energy wireless standard is, the important piece will be creating an ecosystem for innovations, applications and end devices to emerge. That’s why Google is working on an open source wireless mesh standard with partner Lighting Science Group, and NXP is open sourcing the software that will run over its chips and across 6LoWPAN. The future of lighting and home devices is networked, and digital — why fight it?

To read the rest of Jeff’s column check out GigaOM Pro.

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According to the report, the new $1 billion dollar data facility that Apple has built and is expected to start using this spring, is one of the worst offenders in the world when it comes to power consumption, both in terms of sheer volume of power required, and in how clean that energy is. The facility will use as much as 100 MW of electricity when it opens, according to Greenpeace, which is the same as around 80,000 homes in the U.S., or 250,000 in the E.U. That energy comes from a grid that uses less than five percent clean energy, with the rest coming from dirty sources that Greenpeace sees as most ecologically harmful and dangerous, like coal and nuclear.

Apple data center choices led to it receiving the lowest clean energy index of all companies rated, with just a 6.7 percent rating. Yahoo topped the list with 55.9 percent clean energy, while Google and Amazon also ranked highly with 36.4 and 26.8 percent, respectively. Apple at least received a higher score in the categories of transparency and mitigation strategy, however, beating out other companies near the bottom like Facebook and Twitter.

Greenpeace acknowledges that in many ways cloud computing can save energy (like by replacing physical disc-based purchases with digital downloads, as Katie mentioned yesterday), but it also advises that focusing on efficiency runs the risk of ignoring the impact of clean vs. dirty energy, which is still a crucial component missing from the tech sector’s sustainability efforts.

Accounting for the energy impact of IT is tricky, as Greenpeace points out in its report, so making too much of these numbers at first blush probably isn’t advisable. Apple also actually hasn’t even started using its N.C. data center, so it’s entirely possible that the estimated energy picture Greenpeace used won’t accurately reflect the in-use figures. But the point is well made that cloud computing’s impact needs to be taken into account when we consider the footprint of tech companies, especially as it moves towards becoming the dominant computing model.

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ITPAC is manufactured by air cooling company Saiver, and the tech uses outside air for cooling, which cuts out the power-hungry chillers that are used in most data centers to keep servers cool. Cooling can traditionally suck up a good half of the energy consumption of a data center.

The ITPAC system is modular — like the shipping container data centers you might have seen out there — and is basically plug-n-play with the servers and everything (see video below). The data center operator doesn’t need to actually construct the building, so this also reduces the need for concrete, steel, piping, copper etc.

Microsoft says the Power Usage Effectiveness metric (or PUE) — which measures the energy efficiency of a data center — of its latest data centers using this technology is between 1.05 and 1.15., though the final PUE of the U.N.’s Nairobi ITPAC data center is yet to be determined.

A PUE of 1 for a data center is excellent, while a PUE of 2 is not so good. Google has touted data center designs that can deliver a PUE of 1.2. The current average PUE for data centers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, is a pretty high 1.92.

Yahoo’s VP of Data Center Engineering & Operations Scott Noteboom told me last year that he thinks high PUEs for Internet companies’ data centers will not be a sustainable competitive offering going forward. That’s an “exciting change that has happened in this business recently,” Noteboom told me.

At Green:Net, Microsoft’s Environmental Strategist Rob Bernard will talk about the company’s green data center designs and its connected cities projects. We’ll also be featuring a discussion at Green:Net between Google’s Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl and Yahoo’s Director, Climate and Energy Strategy, Christina Page, about green data center tech, and Greenpeace will release new data on clean power and the cloud.

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Users simply upload a report to a database monitored by board employees. A report can include a photo taken with your device, and information about the water level, flow rate, and how much trash there is present, in addition to information about your location automatically shared by your iPhone. Any required info can be entered via buttons, so there’s no laborious typing involved unless you want to add a comment. A “Definitions” button provides the scale by which conditions may be measured, cutting down on the level of guesswork involved.

The app stores a history of your reports locally, and also provides a map that’s updated with observations as they come in, so you can see if someone else has already reported similar conditions in your immediate area.

IBM designed the app to make it as easy as possible for local residents and visitors to contribute productively to the management of the state’s ecosystem, and to do so without any expert knowledge. The tech firm noted that contaminated water is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, beating out crime and war, according to a UN study. According to Christine Robson of IBM’s research division (speaking to InformationWeek), the app is a great example of the ecological good that can come from crowdsourcing:

Creek Watch lets the average citizen contribute to the health of their water supply — without PhDs, chemistry kits and a lot of time. Harnessing the crowdsourced data movement for a cause people care about is a win-win-win for citizens, local water boards, and IBM’s desire to solve big data challenges.

If this experiment works, it could have huge potential for use in the U.S. and abroad. Waterway monitoring is expensive, and local, state and national preservation agencies just don’t have the resources available to adequately cover that much ground. Putting even basic monitoring duties in the hands of concerned citizens, and eliminating technological and knowledge barriers that might otherwise prevent them from participating, could result in major progress in our guardianship of our crucial freshwater resources.

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According to Apple, the charger sets a new industry standard for lowering standby power usage by sensing when its batteries have achieved a full charge and then automatically reducing its power consumption. Each charger comes with six high-performance AA NiMH batteries with an estimated lifespan of up to 10 years per battery. With six batteries,  you should be able to power your wireless keyboard, new Magic Trackpad, and still have two replacements left at full charge. It’s worth noting, though, that the first generation of the aluminum wireless keyboard actually requires three AA batteries.

Apple’s sales pitch offers us the chance to “..finally break the cycle of buying and disposing of those toxic, single-use alkaline batteries.” This is undoubtedly the natural continuation of Apple’s ongoing effort to improve its image as an environmentally responsible company. Energy efficiency has been one of the company’s primary avenues for reducing the impact its products have on the environment.

While scoring relatively well in the most recent Greenpeace Guide to Greener Electronics for efforts to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals in its products, Apple still took some knocks for waste and energy. Whenever it builds a product with an internal battery, Apple goes to great length to ensure it’s the most efficient it possibly can be in the space available. I suppose it’s only natural, then, that it has now extended that design philosophy to batteries that are removable as well.