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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.
I wanted my Iphone laid to rest as I knew it in life.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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...
The troy ounce (oz t) is a unit of imperial measure, now commonly used to measure the mass (weight, in common parlance) of precious metals. One troy ounce is defined as exactly 31.1034768 g, which may be used to denote the value of a precious metal.
so that's about $39,539 (USD) per kilogram of gold.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The troy ounce is about 10% heavier (ratio 192/175) than the avoirdupois ounce, used for everyday purposes in the United States, which equals 28.349523125 g.
Interestingly, the wikipedia page continues with:
Troy ounces are still often used in precious metal markets in countries that otherwise use the metric system
Whereas the French page says it is in use mainly in English-speaking countries for precious metals. Yet, in a funny twist of history:
The name "troy" is first attested in 1390. Though it is often connected to a fair at the city of Troyes, France, this story may have been invented in the 18th century.
Of course, the French page does not say anything about the story being apocryphal.
It's actually far cheaper to extract precious metals and such from e-waste than to mine it from the earth. The reason is simple - e-waste has a higher concentration of the metals than raw ore. So it's far cheaper to extract from e-waste than it is pull it out of the ground. And since it's easier, it's also less damaging on the environment since less energy is used extracting the metals.
It's is generally the case too. If Apple's robot pre-sorts the mateirals you can get even higher extraction rates and less energy use overall.
That's the cost of following the law, being nice to environment is a side effect. Apple, as a device manufacturer is under *obligation* to recycle their phones, as long as they want to sell them in 700+ million market called Europe.
Here is quick summary of ROHS 2002/95/EC and WEEE 2002/96/EC directives: https://lwn.net/Articles/68380...
:wq
Bulk shipping is extremely cheap. My uncle asked a guy working with international bulk shipping about the price, and was told that box with a pair of shoes cost less than half a US dollar to ship from Asia to Europe. That was ten years ago, but I have no reason to expect that it has gotten significantly more expensive since then.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
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.