Cast your mind back to the 1990s when Apple was just another struggling computer maker battling for survival against the growing dominance of the PC.

Apple managed to revive its flagging fortunes when it had the genius idea of making a multicoloured machine that incorporated the hard drive and the monitor in one unit. Then came the iPod, and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the company has recently met with a wall of objection and been forced to change its ways in one key area.

These ways are better known as its environmental practices. In April the firm courted controversy when it was ranked last – again – in Greenpeace’s Green Electronics Guide, which rates PC and mobile manufacturers on their green polices and practices.

The environmental campaigner gave Apple a score of 2.7 out of 10 for its performance and stated: ‘Apple has made no changes to its policies or practices since and the company scores badly on almost all criteria.’

Such a classification is not good PR. So much so that at the beginning of May Apple’s chief executive Steve

Jobs pledged to remove arsenic, polyvinyl chloride and brominated fire retardants – all harmful chemicals – from its existing products by next year. And he also promised that the company will recycle 30 per cent of its electronic waste by 2010.

Analyst Gartner said a couple of weeks ago that the IT industry contributes two per cent of the world’s carbon emissions (Computing, 3 May). And the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs calculates that servers consume four per cent of all energy in the UK, increasing to 12 per cent by 2020.

Such figures and poor green practices are no longer acceptable. The environmental tide is very much on the turn and businesses and consumers are becoming increasingly intolerant of poor environmental credentials.

It is only a matter of time before having irresponsible green actions will be considered as unfavourably as child exploitation or whale hunting. It will simply not be tolerated.

The green revolution has arrived, and as manufacturers are forced to clean up their acts, so must users.

Businesses large and small cannot afford to ignore environmental warnings. Not only do they have a moral duty to clean up their act, but as green becomes cool, firms that want to keep their reputations intact must prove their environmental responsibility or face the consequences.