Just the other week, Apple released information on the lifecycle greenhouse gas impacts of its entire business, including manufacturing, transportation, product use, and end-of-life. In doing so, Apple becomes the first company in the electronics industry to layout its entire carbon footprint, providing detail not only on their operations but also on individual products as well.

This is a bold move by a company that historically is better known for its innovation in other areas. For years, environmental groups have pushed for better reporting of these impacts. Manufacturers have been slow to respond, in part because modeling the lifecycle impacts of electronics is challenging, especially due to the complex supply chains associated with electronics manufacturing and assembly.

Interesting stat: 53% of Apple’s total greenhouse gas emissions are due to the use of their products. In other words, continuing to drive energy efficiency into products, the less sexy side of alternative energy, is still important work to do.

Because Apple gets a lot of press for their innovation efforts, their brand halo on the environment is a little more positive than it should be. Relative to Dell, IBM, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard, Apple was a latecomer in addressing the recycling and reuse of computers. And although Apple has been touting their green product design recently, there is a general shift toward greener products by all electronics firms, in large part due to European Union directives and US EPA-supported standards, like Energy Star and EPEAT.

At the same time, Apple has often received a disproportionate share of criticism from environmental groups about the company’s lack of aggressive goal setting and weak environmental reporting. Environmental policy has seen far too many ambitious goals without any deep strategic implementation, and far too many companies have made bold claims that amount to little more than greenwashing—misleading consumer information about a company’s true environmental impact.

From what I’ve seen in the past, Apple works on the environment in the same way it works on new products: get people excited (and concerned) about what they may be doing, work on interesting things behind closed doors with select partners, and then finally make a big announcement when they’ve actually done something great. The company’s efforts on greenhouse gas emissions reporting is just the latest example.