Why Apple wants your old iPhone
Apple want’s your old iPhone back so it can make new products.
DESPITE a proven record of being largely coy about its inner-workings, Apple has opened up about one future plan for all of its products and it’s pretty amazing.
Apple’s 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report details the tech giants plans to manufacture all of its products with 100 per cent renewable or recycled materials.
The company hopes to establish a “closed-loop supply chain” for aluminium, copper, tin and tungsten, with hopes to stop mining the earth altogether.
Apple hopes to achieve this by using a combination of recycled metals from suppliers and recycled material from its own returned products.
“We are committing as a company to not necessarily having to source from the earth for everything that we need,” Apple wrote on its updated Environment site.
“One day, we’d like to be able to build new products with just recycled materials, including your old products.”
While being fully sustainable is still a ways off yet, the building blocks are slowly being put into place.
Since 2016, Apple has been using its recycling robot Liam, which extracts recyclable materials from iPhones.
True innovation means considering what happens to a product at every stage of its life cycle. Liam disassembles your iPhone when it?s no longer functioning, so the materials inside can live on. Courtesy: Apple
The machine disassembles the company’s smartphones and takes gold and copper from the camera, cobalt and lithium from the battery, and silver and platinum from the logic board.
Sustainability doesn’t just stop with recycling old iPhones, with the company’s massive new headquarters, Apple Park, using 100 per cent renewable energy from solar, hydro and wind sources.
Apple also claims over 99 per cent of its packaging comes from materials sourced from protected sustainable forests.
“We are now protecting and creating enough sustainably managed forests in China and the United States to cover all of Apple’s product packaging needs,” read the report.
Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives Lisa Jackson added the company felt it was important to be open about its plans.
“We’re actually doing something we rarely do, which is announce a goal before we’ve completely figured out how to do it,” she told Vice.
“So we’re a little nervous, but we also think it’s really important, because as a sector we believe it’s where technology should be going.
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