There ’s a fancynew iPhone recycling roboton the block , just in clock time to help Apple rack up some brownie points with the greens on Earth Day . Its name is Daisy , and it ’s being covered with thesamebreathlessenthusiasmthetechblogosphereserved upfor its predecessor , Liam .
The bot can apparently call on 200 iPhones into a grouped big bucks of screens , screw , and chips every time of day , a process that isundeniably cool to watch . But , at least in their current configuration , origination like Daisy are n’t pop off to save us from ourgrowing mountain of tocopherol - waste .
Daisy is part of Apple ’s big ambitiousness of achieving a “ closed - grommet ” provision chain , a goal the company first announced in its 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report . In itsmost late environmental responsibility report , released Thursday , Apple not only introduced the fresh golem , but a brusque - list of vital material it ’s hoping Daisy can help us recuperate first , including atomic number 27 , copper , and rare earths .
https://gizmodo.com/why-are-we-so-bad-at-recycling-rare-metals-from-technol-1772662824
“ These materials will then be air back into secondary materials markets — fill up the loop on these material and reducing the penury to mine more resources from the earth , ” the composition understand .
Like Liam , Apple ’s first iPhone recycling automaton , Daisy is a prototype , and so far there ’s just one . But Apple has plans to scale up , sayingit intend to add the bot in “ multiple locations around the macrocosm , ” beginning with a second Daisy somewhere in Europe ( the first is located in the U.S. ) .
Beyond the fact that these are prototypes , though , there ’s a bigger issue when it come to banking on Apple ’s robots to deconstruct Apple ’s phones . It have in mind you ’re going to have to give your phone back to Apple .
To the party ’s acknowledgment , it has spent the last few yearsbeefing up its recycling enterprisingness , launching a free recycling program visit Apple Renew in 2016 , and this week denote Apple GiveBack , which boost users to trade in devices for a natural endowment poster ( if they specify ) .
It ’s undecipherable how successful these programs have been . As of publishing , Apple has not responded to a request for information on how many iPhones got returned for recycling last year . But withmore than a billion phonessold since 2007 , we can assume many older generation phones have n’t made it back to the company — and withso much of our einsteinium - waste winding up right in the glass , the best we can probably hope for is for a plenty of these phones to eventually wind up with third - party recyclers .
“ Barring a very large musical scale deployment of Daisy or her sisters , most recycling is operate to be done by autonomous recyclers — by human hands , ” Gary Cook , a aged IT analyst at Greenpeace , told Earther .
That brings us to another worry . iPhones ( most Apple products , really ) are becoming hard and harder for humankind to deconstruct , with progressively miniaturized part that are increasingly glued and soldered together .
Jason Linnell , executive theatre director of the National Center for Electronics Recycling , tell Earther that most consumer einsteinium - wasteland handlers are n’t really set up for the precision work needed to deconstruct a smartphone . They ’re still mainly receive older , bulky reckoner , printers , and most of all , our now - ancient CRT TVs .
“ They ’ve invested in with child pieces of shredding equipment , and that ’s not really what you require to do with a lozenge or a pocket-sized equipment , ” Linnell say .
While some of the older , cheaper pill are starting to make it into the consumer due east - waste stream , Linnell says smartphones are still mostly being refurbished and resold . When they eventually start up flood the recycling plants , it ’s depart to make big challenges for the industry , which’ll have to drop less time shredding and more sentence painstakingly picking gadgets aside for small and small amounts of textile to be resold .
In some case , that just might not be economic , meaning phones with lots of valuable bit may be wastefully shredded or thrown out .
Linnell said that in his purview , the best thing that could amount out of robot like Daisy is for Apple to become more aware of disassembly challenges and contrive next telephone set that are easier to take aside for recycling , but also for basic repairs like battery and screen replacement .
He stressed that we should be focusing on refurbishing and reselling smartphones as long as we can , and that sham everything to recycle the raw textile a la Daisy is really “ the last step . ”
Cook concord . “ We need to ensure [ our ] investiture [ in new devices ] lasts as long as potential , ” he say . “ Apple could be making design pick that make certain they last . ”
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