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Apple Forces Recyclers To Shred All iPhones and MacBooks (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Apple released its Environmental Responsibility Report Wednesday, an annual grandstanding effort that the company uses to position itself as a progressive, environmentally friendly company. Behind the scenes, though, the company undermines attempts to prolong the lifespan of its products. Apple's new moonshot plan is to make iPhones and computers entirely out of recycled materials by putting pressure on the recycling industry to innovate. But documents obtained by Motherboard using Freedom of Information requests show that Apple's current practices prevent recyclers from doing the most environmentally friendly thing they could do: Salvage phones and computers from the scrap heap. Apple rejects current industry best practices by forcing the recyclers it works with to shred iPhones and MacBooks so they cannot be repaired or reused -- instead, they are turned into tiny shards of metal and glass. "Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass," John Yeider, Apple's recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called "Takeback Program Report" in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials. After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."
Taking an old PC and repurposing it with Linux, or even an older version of MS Windows (say 7) is much easier than working with Macs. Apple's software ecosystem is designed around planned obsolescence. Old computers simply can't run the latest versions of macOS yet the ecosystem pretty much requires it. Much Mac software won't run on versions of OS X prior to 10.8 these days. This combined with Apple's apparently heavy-handed tactics with recyclers really make Macs poor in the recycling department as compared to Windows and Linux. It is possible to run either Windows or Linux on an older Mac, of course. Maybe that's an option for recyclers.
Screw Apple. Here's a link that lets you search from a comprehensive list of local non-profit computer re-purposers (scroll down the page a bit):
National Christina Foundation