North Carolina's Green Swamp Preserve Used to Make New iPhone Boxes

According to a recent reporting earlier this month (Sept. 2018) by the Wilmington Star (Wilmington, N.C., USA) If you bought an iPhone lately, there’s a chance the box was made using trees from Southeastern North Carolina.

Computer giant Apple and The Conservation Fund partnered in 2015 to purchase about 3,600 acres of forest in Brunswick County, bordering the Green Swamp Preserve. The site includes 629 acres of wetlands and 9 miles of streams, according to The Conservation Fund.

According to an Oct. 2017 Apple report on paper and packaging strategy, timber from the Brunswick Forest and Maine’s Reed Forest has been pulped and used to generate enough pulp to make a stack of iPhone 6s boxes that, stacked on top of each other, would stand more than 1,500 times as high as Mt. Everest.

"As our paper demands grow and change, we will continue protecting and creating enough responsibly managed forest to cover all our packaging needs," Apple stated in a 2017 environmental sustainability report.

In fiscal year 2017, Apple for the first time produced more fiber from its conservation project than it had used the year before.

Working forests such as those in Brunswick County and Maine provide timber and pulp. According to The Conservation Fund, almost 45 million acres of the nation’s 420 million acres of working forest are facing peril from encroaching development. Apple and The Conservation Fund have partnered to purchase a 3,600-acre forest in Brunswick County near the Green Swamp Preserve. 

"As forests become fragmented, their ability to filter our water and remove carbon dioxide from the air is compromised, and there is less space for wildlife to live and migrate. That harms our climate, our wild places and our economy," a Conservation Fund spokeswoman wrote in an email.

The Venus’ flytrap and Hessel’s hairstreak butterfly are among those that can be found on the Brunswick land, according to a natural resource assessment commissioned by The Conservation Fund.

To protect those natural resources, The Conservation Fund implemented its Working Forest Fund program.

"It buys time," the spokeswoman wrote, adding funding helps the environmental group develop a management plan and implement safeguards before it is returned to private ownership or a public agency.

In Brunswick County, the land is protected by a conservation easement, guaranteeing it will remain a forest.

The Conservation Fund has bolstered that forest by trees on 300 acres of the land, including 40 acres of longleaf pine and Atlantic white cedar. In total, at least 185,000 trees have been planted on the site.