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Apple's Recycling Initiatives Recover $40 Million In Gold (macrumors.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple released its latest annual environmental report yesterday with numbers detailing how much the company has been able to recover from old devices. Business Insider notes that Apple was able to recover over 61 million pounds of steel, aluminum, glass, and other materials from its computers and iPhones. This includes a total of 2,204 pounds of gold worth $40 million at current prices ($1,229.80 per troy ounce of gold). Cult of Mac ran the figures quoted by Apple through today's metal prices, and came up with individual figures for copper ($6.4 million), aluminum ($3.2 million), silver ($1.6 million), nickel ($160,426), zinc ($109,503), and lead ($33,999). Last month, Apple unveiled an iPhone recycling robot, named Liam, that salvages old parts.
Not everything is about making a profit. Sometimes the doing right thing for the environment is a price worth paying.
I think that might have even been their whole idea with this, too...
Different thing. There's two existing approaches to recycling electronics
1) Shred the electronics, then roughly sort the resulting shreds by magnets, density, size, optical properties, manual sorting etc.
2) Ship it to a third world country where children will end up recycling by dismantling with hammers and open fires.
Apple's approach is a new one. Because all the models they are recycling are there's and they know how they are constructed, they have robots reverse the process, unscrewing, unclipping and ungluing each part down to it's components. And they know exactly what's in each of those components, and the components can be recycles on mass.
This is far more efficient than the other methods, better for the environment, and doesn't damage worker's health.