Where do old iPhone parts go? Apple may be using them to build new phones

Figure 1: Daisy, Apple's recycling robot, can disassemble old iPhones recycled through the "trade-in" program

According to foreign media reports, abandoned smartphones have brought about a serious e-waste problem, posing a threat to environmental pollution and residents' health. With the help of the recycling robot Daisy, Apple is helping to solve the growing e-waste challenge. In the future, new iPhones may be made entirely of recycled second-hand parts.

The following is the translation:

In an industrial park in Austin, Texas, there is an unmarked building, a secret location that has never been shown on Apple Maps, where Apple has been developing a new technology. Inside the glass cover, the automatic robotic arm can move quickly and precisely left and right and up and down on the conveyor belt. Several technicians wearing blue lab coats, goggles and gloves watched the mist swirl around the robotic arm. The mist is caused by the extreme cold inside the glass cover, where the indoor temperature can drop to minus 112 degrees Celsius. Loud mechanical clatters broke the low hum of the machine as it ran.

The complex system, called Daisy, combines automation and human intervention to give Apple a lot of benefits: pure plastic, metal and glass fragments separated from otherwise unusable iPhones. "We spend a lot of time on the engineering side to make sure our products are perfectly assembled," said Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives. "Daisy gives us an efficient way to quickly and accurately disassemble these products."

Daisy represents not only a major breakthrough in electronics recycling, with robots quickly and precisely taking apart electronic devices, but also a roadmap for minimizing environmental impact. Apple is proud of its green credentials. A large portion of the company's supply chain is powered by renewable energy, for example. Now, Apple is turning its attention to an equally thorny problem: the fast-growing and often toxic debris of discarded electronic devices.

Apple announced a goal in 2017 to eventually make all of its products from recycled or renewable materials. Apple has not said when that goal will be achieved, but this building is where the company conducts its research. The building, formally known as the Material Recovery Lab, just opened in April.

E-waste management is becoming an increasingly complex issue. According to the Global E-waste Monitor, 44 million tons of e-waste were generated worldwide in 2016, which is equivalent to the weight of 4,500 Eiffel Towers. Household e-waste, including consumer electronics, accounts for a smaller proportion, at 1.6 million tons last year, according to the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Callie Babbitt, an associate professor at the Golisano Institute, said the total amount of e-waste is actually decreasing as companies introduce sleeker, smaller products. But she explained that a new problem is emerging: "The products we use today rely on increasingly complex mixtures of rare earth materials and precious metals. As companies introduce new products at an increasingly rapid pace, even automated systems may have trouble keeping up with recycling them."

Apple, which declined to estimate the size of its e-waste footprint, sold 217.7 million iPhones last year. With an average phone weighing about 140 grams, that means Apple has put about 30,000 tons of material into households around the world through phones alone. Many of those phones would have ended up as waste if consumers had better options.

Daisy represents a "critical step" toward Apple's goal, said Jackson, who led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for five years before joining Apple. The robot, which debuted last year, can disassemble 15 different iPhone models at a rate of 200 per hour. Daisy and its sister machine in the Netherlands are disassembling about 1 million of the 9 million iPhones Apple has recycled through its trade-in program since April, with most of the others being refurbished and resold.

Apple has listed 14 materials used in its products that it hopes to eventually be able to fully recycle. One is plastic, which takes hundreds of years to decompose, poses a threat to wildlife, and releases harmful toxins as it corrodes. Another is lithium, a key material in making rechargeable batteries, and mining lithium can cause serious damage to the environment. With the help of Daisy, Apple has recovered all 14 elements and recycled them, and is also recycling tin and aluminum for new Apple products such as the MacBook Air.

Traditional e-waste recycling facilities are not as sophisticated as Daisy. Most plants rely on bulky machines to shred products and then pour them into containers of mixed particles. These mixed materials are more difficult to recycle, and some elements are lost, stuck or discarded in the process. Jackson said Apple not only wants to improve its own production processes, but also hopes to improve the way the entire industry produces and recycles. Apple Austin Lab is committed to extensive e-waste recycling research and development, hoping to develop more innovations to enable all recycling facilities to recycle more materials and improve the consumer technology supply chain.

Apple's goal is a long road that requires the joint efforts of many people in the industry. Even Jackson said that she did not think the goal could be achieved at first. But after talking with engineers and team members, she found that comprehensive recycling is not only possible, but also crucial. She said: "If we don't take the time to invest and ensure that the hardware is used for a long time and the materials are reused, we will encounter more problems that we cannot overcome."