The iPhone 6 was released yesterday, as everyone knows (though you can’t actually get your hands on one until September 19), and along with the flurry of tweets and blog posts and news articles came — naturally — a tacit claim about its environmental prowess.

 

According to yesterday’s live-streamed event in Cupertino, Calif., Apple’s commitment to the environment includes a mercury-free, arsenic-free, and beryllium-free iPhone 6, among other things. This follows the company’s official ban, a few weeks ago, of benxene and n-hexane — two toxic chemicals previously used in the final assembly of Apple products.

 

Those who speculated they would be able to charge their phones with their screens are sorely disappointed. The much-anticipated iPhone 6 screen — which Apple said yesterday is indeed “laminated to a single crystal of sapphire, the hardest transparent material after diamond” — may be manufactured using solar power. But it isn’t (yet) a built-in solar panel itself.