The company is trying to find ways to get more materials out of its old products, but recycling advocates say it needs to be changing how they’re designed, not how they’re recycled.
ADELE PETERS writes for Fast Company
Inside Apple’s sprawling materials recovery lab in Austin, a custom room-size robot with five separate arms has pulled apart hundreds of thousands of iPhones over the last year, making it possible to access the valuable materials inside for recycling. Nearby, the lab is filled with standard equipment that already exists in electronic recycling facilities around the world, so academics and Apple engineers can study ways to improve traditional recycling. It’s part of the company’s work toward a larger vision of a circular economy: What will it take to make electronics in a truly closed loop?
“Our goal is that future products would be made from recycled or renewable materials,” says Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environmental, social, and policy initiatives, who served as the head of the Obama-era EPA before joining the tech company. “So, in a sense, the materials that are in yesterday’s iPhone . . . could find their way back into the same supply chain we use to make tomorrow’s.”
Today, smartphones are made with dozens of materials—from gold and silver to phosphorus and titanium—mined in processes that are often environmentally and socially destructive. But all of those materials could eventually be recovered from old electronics instead. “We have lots of trials going on with various specialty recyclers, really around the world, who are all trying to figure out how to get the hundred or so elements of the periodic table back out of our devices and other devices after they come to [their] end of life,” Jackson says.
Earlier this year, the company announced that it was using recycled cobalt in new batteries for the first time, sourced from old iPhones that Apple collected through a trade-in program and then disassembled with Daisy, its custom recycling robot. Avoiding the need to mine cobalt is a major step; the majority of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, sometimes mined by hand (despite the toxicity of the material) in dangerous pits. Mining waste can pollute local drinking water. Though Apple audits its suppliers to make sure they meet the tech company’s standards for supplier responsibility—and scored highest in a recent report about how companies manage conflict minerals—it can be difficult for companies to fully track what each supplier is doing. And even if a particular mining company avoids human rights abuses such as child labor, the basic process of digging any material out of the ground (sometimes with heavy machinery or explosives), and smelting and refining it, has an environmental cost. Recycling materials from the billion-plus iPhones that already exist makes more sense.
The company’s massive robot, which it considers a pilot project, is one experiment in finding a way to better access materials in old phones. At e-waste recycling plants now, old electronics go through shredders that tear up the device before the materials are sorted and sold on the commodities market. The process of shredding makes full recovery impossible; valuable rare earth minerals used as magnets in the iPhone’s speaker, for example, can attach themselves to other metal during the process and be lost.
The robot works much more carefully, though it can disassemble as many as 200 phones in an hour. Recovering more of an individual material—like cobalt—makes it possible for Apple to have enough volume to convince a recycler to take its material so it can be recycled back into new batteries. The company spent years developing the technology behind Daisy, which builds on another disassembly robot, called Liam, that it released in 2016. It now has two massive, 33-foot-long Daisy robots, and continues to improve the design. But the company recognizes that it also needs to find ways to work with the existing recycling process for electronics even as it continues exploring brand-new technology. “We have to do both,” says Jackson. “We found that the state of the recycling sector has really not moved much when it comes to consumer electronics.”
It’s critical to work with existing systems, says Kyle Wiens, CEO of the electronics repair company iFixit. “The idea that you can have a specialized robot that’s designed for one product that can take it apart carefully and precisely and get you a better material yield for that product—that’s totally true,” he says. “You can do that . . . You’re going to get more gold running it through Daisy than you would through a traditional recycling process. However, the idea that [a recycling plant has to] have to have a million-dollar robot per product that they’re going to disassemble just doesn’t work. It’s not the way recycling works.”
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