Apple wants to recycle your old iPhone so badly that it built a robot to do the job. The company introduced Liam to the world earlier this year in a slick promotional video. He’s got 29 arms and can disassemble an old phone in 11 seconds flat, breaking it down into assorted bins of screens, screws, SIM card trays, and spare batteries.
Liam can take apart 1.2 million iPhones a year, and Apple created a special program for customers — called Renew — to keep him busy. Besides your phone, the company will happily take your iPods and Pads, your Bluetooth keyboards, your now-defunct wired earbuds, your dongles and adaptors and fraying power cords, all for the sweet, sweet price of free.
Sounds great, right? Once Liam has taken a phone to pieces, Apple sells the components to recyclers. It’s billed as a clean system from a company publicly touting greater environmental accountability: Potentially dangerous lithium batteries can be dealt with on their own, while valuable metals are concentrated for recycling.
But there’s a commercial interest at work here, too, and — sorry Liam — handing your old devices over to the company that made them might not be the best option for you or the planet. Because Apple has a proprietary interest in keeping decommissioned or counterfeit iPhones off the market, it imposes a “full-destruction” policy on its recycling partners — which means that some components that could be reused wind up destroyed instead. That’s quite a waste.
When Apple destroys your old device, plenty of perfectly functional computer processing chips and cameras that could live on — whether in refurbished phones, toy pianos, hobby drones, or smart appliances — get melted down. Screens that could have replaced cracked ones, lending a few years of life to an older phone, are pulverized, and the trace amounts of the minerals that make them work are lost as so much dust.
What’s more, all the energy that went into mining, refining, manufacturing, shipping, and assembling those materials evaporates. According to Apple’s latest environmental responsibility report, the average Apple product takes 252 pounds of CO2 to make — and 77 percent of the company’s total greenhouse gas production comes from manufacturing.
The Renew approach is better than letting electronics, with their resource-intensive combination of precious metals and finely-wrought technology, sit in a drawer or a landfill. And the company is ahead of the curve when it comes to taking responsibility for the waste stream generated each time the company releases a new phone. But when you find your smartphone getting on in years, there’s a better option than giving it to a robot.
To read the full story, visit http://grist.org/business-technology/apples-recycling-robot-wants-your-old-iphone-dont-give-it-to-him/.