Along with the rest of the world, Greenpeace was keeping an eye on Apple on Thursday for the unveiling of their new notebooks. However unlike others, who were interested in the (sometimes literally) shiny new features of the MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, the environmental organization wanted to see if the Cupertino, CA company kept their pledge to reduce toxic materials in their products.

Greenpeace have found that the company did live up to many of its promises, but could have done more. Nevertheless Apple’s merits are to be recognized, says Greenpeace, for several important improvements to their fabrication process.
"A check of the full specs revealed the MacBook Pro, MacBook and MacBook Air, as well as the [new] LED Cinema Display, will now have internal cables free of PVC and will have internal components containing no BFRs," said Greenpeace in a statement on Wednesday.

Brominated Flame Retardants, or BFRs, are used in electrical wiring and applications around the world, although studies have shown that some of its chemicals, particularly polybrominated diphenyl ether, could have harmful effects to humans, therefore cautionary steps are being taken to reduce them by many electronic hardware companies, including Apple.
Another potentially harmful chemical being removed by Apple from its laptops is polyvinyl chloride (PVC), which has several hazardous components, particularly dioxin, which may cause cancer.

Greenpeace are taking it with a grain of salt though, calling Apple’s measures "not quite the breakthrough we were hoping for. These new MacBooks are currently on a similar level of toxics reduction to the Sony Vaio laptop series on PVC and the Lenovo Think Vision in monitors. The BFR-free internal components represent an improvement from the bar set by the Vaio line."
Nevertheless, the organization does recognize that Apple are the first to take these measures, and are saying that if Apple can do it, there is now no excuse for other computer manufacturers who have made similar pledges such as HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba to go green as well by 2009.