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.

Comments

Re:Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction

[zdzichu]

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...