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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."
This is, has been, and continues to be a problem. It's easy to blame Apple but it's an industry wide issue. It's so much more profitable to sell a new product than to repair and sell a used one. Also the industry's business model is to dump the old and get the new latest product. This model will not last long if the market is full of old products. So it's not surprising that they rather destroy than repair and sell.
The solution lies on the user. At some point we have to take blame on how the industry functions. Apple would not be the mammoth it is if we did not buy and support their business model.
What Apple is doing is to make a show of their recycling effort so that most people don't feel bad about getting a new Apple product but they can still continue to sell and make the most profits. Make no mistake profits will win over recycling.
To fix this, we could pressure the company to reform their ways by buying the competition's products that follow more sustainable practices. Not likely since they are so good at selling and there probably isn't a direct replacement. Or we can pressure our government representatives to do something about it. A good candidate solution since we have slowly increased what companies must do to protect the environment. We are not at the best point but we are getting there. We need to add pressure to our reps to continue. What they've done is not enough.
The best thing we can do is to resist the pressure to upgrade our gadgets. No we don't need to upgrade every year and no we don't need the new shiny gadget that will be put in the dump in a few months. The fix starts with us.
Apple is incredibly anti-consumer and anti-environment to milk tiny amounts of additional profit. I am so shocked...
Green policies are for PR, not for everyday use.
My 2010 MacBook Pro disagrees with you. Running the latest version of macOS very well thanks.
Your post was essentially fact free and biased garbage.
Thank you Apple for ensuring the data on my old phone won't be compromised.
Yup, the idea that components can be reused is absurd. If you can take a macbook and suck all the material out of it and turn it back to input, that's actually a much better result than keeping it running: battery tech has improved, power consumption is down, etc. I suppose it's a criticism of modern computers that they aren't modular the way PCs used to be, but this isn't really something Apple invented. What the hell else am I supposed to do with an old computer that isn't working anymore? Repair is likely to cost as much as buying a new one, so if you can't recycle everything, the alternative is landfill.
Well, how about imagine this scenario. Let's say Apple's recyclers are allowed to recycle components. NAND flash chips from all sorts of devices are collected - how long before some very embarrassing, sensitive, or even damaging information thought deleted from someone's phone is recovered from one of those chips?
While I am no fan of Apple nor their business practices, their current recycling method represents the best they can do while taking the precautions they need to take to ensure safety. They can't allow any chips out, or else once that door is opened it's only a matter of time before the wrong chips get out. Shredding the devices and putting policies in place to ensure they are /all/ shredded represents the best they can hope for.
And yes, before a phone is turned in it /should/ be wiped of anything sensitive, but do /you/ know how to ensure every bit of data is cleaned off your phone at the flash level?
This doesn't change anything. The people who buy into Apple mindshare will continue to buy Apple, and the rest of us will continue to repurpose old hardware for new roles and pretty much ignore the shiny trendy things. And there will be enough Apple fans for Apple to continue to make boatloads of money. And many of those fans will be all hyped up to save the earth and recycle everything and battle global warming, while not even recognizing the irony of throwing away an $800 phone every 18 months.
But we will, apparently, continue to argue about it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Dude, you've completely missed the point - on average, Macs running Mac OS last in active use longer than most Wintel hardware. I've seen organisations run fleets of Macs w/o upgrading the hardware, that exceed Windows XP's software lifetimes. The 10.8 comment is almost irrelevant - you know the Mac App Store automatically provides OLD versions to OLD OS versions that can't run the latest version of an App, don't you ?
This article is nothing to do with planned obsolescence - its about devices that are broken beyond economic repair or maybe need high risk / low yield repairs - sure you might be able to desolder and replace components at a surface mount level on a multi-layer board, but doing that at scale, you cause secondary damage a fraction of the time, and the technician time rapidly ends up outweighing the hardware costs.
Apple policy means that half repaired but forensically recoverable storage isn't thrown out in the trash (as an example).
Unless they've been blatantly lying to everyone, the non-volatile memory is encrypted.
Apple doesn't force anybody to do anything here. People hired by Apple are expected to do what Apple hired them to do. Apple refurbs and resells tons of devices. what it can't it recycles. Every junkyard in the world crushes tons of cars with usable parts. there simply comes a point when they are not worth the work required to reclaim them.
Apple doesn't do anything to prevent anyone from reselling or giving away an iPhone or Mac--there is a thriving reseller market for both. Macs hold their value much better than PCs do, for example; specifically because they last longer. Apple itself has a refurbishment program that resells pre-owned Macs & iPhones.
This is just about what happens when Apple sends some old device to an authorized recycler. Should Apple allow that recycler to piece out individual parts and sell them on a gray market? possibly selling hard drives with customer data still on them? Or should Apple insist that they shred the devices and recycle them.
Reasonable people could disagree about which strategy is more responsible--but in the grand scheme of things to get pissed about, this is pretty lame. Do you have any idea how many electronic devices don't get recycled at all? Who recycles your old cable box? Who recycles your shoes?
It's increasingly difficult to tell the difference between Slashdot and Breitbart--the same sort of manufactured outrage exist on both.
It stands to reason, though, that if they want to make phones from reused materials then they have to strip everything down to the raw materials so they can reuse them, no?
> After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale.
Sounds like they're recycling the raw materials, just not the parts. Not 100% ideal, but it beats them winding up in a landfill.
Say what?
Yup, the idea that components can be reused is absurd.
While re-using parts soldered onto PCB's is usually not practical, there certainly ARE components such as keyboards, displays, and drives that could well be re-used. But that's not even the real point - in may cases we're talking about fully functional devices that are being shredded. That's outright fucking criminal. Each device represents a huge investment of energy - therefore each device should be used as long as it works and someone wants it. Destroying fully functional equipment 'because business' or 'because shareholders' is stupid, shortsighted, and immoral.
Repair is likely to cost as much as buying a new one...
'Uneconomical to repair'? Most often these days, that's a pile of contrived bullshit. Manufacturers set it up that way. They do so partly by purposely making equipment difficult or impossible to service, and by charging scandalous prices for replacement parts. They also do it by having artificially low prices for their goods. If the REAL costs were factored in, (depletion of natural resources, environmental damage, climate change, the human costs of slave labour, etc.), goods would be much more expensive to purchase, as they should be. Repairability and longevity would then be not only cost-effective, but necessary, and the market for used equipment would be huge. Instead, we have companies fattening their bottom lines at the expense of future generations, in the service of a Ponzi scheme of an economy whose only guiding principle is "more growth is better, and unlimited growth is best". Which, incidentally, is the guiding principle of cancer, infections, and a whole host of other similar phenomena which rob human beings of life and dignity.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Apple does a good job to prevent some advertisement company or other cybercriminal gang to reuse data you left on the hard disk of broken notebook or flash memory of your phone.
Anyone who thinks Apple cares about recycling is completely blind to what is really happening behind the scenes.
Not only Apple does not recycle crap, they also are actively spending money via lobbying to kill stuff like the right to repair bill which would help independent repair shops to fix iPhones, Macs and whatnot and prolong their lives.
The "official repair" Apple does usually ammounts to throwing away easily repairable units to force costumers to buy refurbished models or newer ones, and they are constantly pushing towards strategies to block independent repair efforts with stuff like error 53 and the more recent software blocking of fingerprint reader replacement on the iPhone 7.
With crap like eliminating "legacy ports" like the headphone jack due to them being "corageous", they've effectively pushed more bluetooth headsets and more dongles into the market which has even more toxic and non-recyclable materials that will be purchased in greater number and will be replaced or lost in a more constant rate, instead of regular headphones that requires less electronic parts.
But the company couldn't care less as long as they are making truckloads of money, which is something most corporations do anyways. It's just damn insulting that they keep trying to push this bullshit and that parts of the press swallow it whole. F*cking predatory company that keeps feeding on public misinformation.
It's known that there are no easy ways of disassembling and reusing old phones component parts to make new ones because it just costs too much more to recover whatever materials were used, but they have no qualms on feeding on regular costumers lack of knowledge on this to paint themselves as a good company that is trying to do "something" about it. Protip for those who don't know about this: it'll result in nothing, and they already know it. It's a token effort. There are no good ways of harvesting raw materials for eWaste to make new components in a financially viable manner, because if there was everyone would be doing it.
Currently, anyone that is well informed or an active part of the problem know full well that the best way of generating less waste is to use electronics for as long as possible. If smartphone companies really wanted to generate less electronic waste, they'd change release schedules and development time to force consumers to keep their damn phones for a longer period of time, plus do as much as possible to keep older units working instead of making them useless after a certain ammount of OS updates. Another way is to make the architecture more open and standardized so that electronics can be used in multiple ways - like old desktops and laptops that you can install some Linux distro and use as an HTPC or something. Of course, Apple stuff is the harderst type of hardware to do something like that.
The only thing Apple really has on their favor is that even older laptops and desktops retain some value in the used market, and some of it's users keeps their stuff even years after they purchased it. But make no mistake. If Apple could find a way to avoid that without a huge fanbase backlash, they would.