Apple's Recycling Initiatives Recover $40 Million In Gold (macrumors.com) 138
An anonymous reader writes: Apple released its latest annual environmental report yesterday with numbers detailing how much the company has been able to recover from old devices. Business Insider notes that Apple was able to recover over 61 million pounds of steel, aluminum, glass, and other materials from its computers and iPhones. This includes a total of 2,204 pounds of gold worth $40 million at current prices ($1,229.80 per troy ounce of gold). Cult of Mac ran the figures quoted by Apple through today's metal prices, and came up with individual figures for copper ($6.4 million), aluminum ($3.2 million), silver ($1.6 million), nickel ($160,426), zinc ($109,503), and lead ($33,999). Last month, Apple unveiled an iPhone recycling robot, named Liam, that salvages old parts.
corpse robbers (Score:4, Funny)
I wanted my Iphone laid to rest as I knew it in life.
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With a cracked screen and bad reception?
Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction (Score:2, Interesting)
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Experimental program not instantly profitable? Say it isn't so!
I'm sure they can improve the efficiency of the extraction process.
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So, is the experiment a success in your opinion? They've extracted a total of about $52 million dollars worth of material for the cost of $100 million...
Do you expect it to become profitable some time in the future?
They'll need to not just improve, but double it just to break even. That recycling is a fraud is increasingly obvious [google.com] — even its cheerleaders have to cite consu [howstuffworks.com]
Its about removing used phones from market (Score:2)
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So, is the experiment a success in your opinion? They've extracted a total of about $52 million dollars worth of material for the cost of $100 million.
Actually, it was just a cost of $5,37. See I can pull numbers from your ass too.
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The $100 mln figure appears in delt0r's post [slashdot.org] above. I now realize, he said "if". The actual number is likely much bigger, actually — otherwise Apple would've been glad to publish it...
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The $100 mln figure appears in delt0r's post [slashdot.org] above. I now realize, he said "if". The actual number is likely much bigger, actually — otherwise Apple would've been glad to publish it...
Yeah, sorry, it was only $3,49. Stop making up stuff, boy.
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Ask yourself why?... The same article adds:
Do you honestly believe, this required less than a
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You've now missed the third chance to offer your own estimates or explain, why mine are incorrect. This confirms, you aren't arguing here in good faith. I shall not continue. *Plonk*...
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This isn't experimental. Electronic companies have been doing this for decades! Apple, like normal, are last to the table and pretend they're the first to come up with the idea. People like you fall for it every single time. What a bizarre world you must live in.
-citation needed-
My understanding was that the companies were only doing this because government regulation in certain countries required them to. I would be interested in some sources to indicate who is recycling and since when. Promises that they are going to do something doesn't count.
Re: Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction (Score:1)
In the Netherlands some form of recycling electronics is obligatory since 1998. So even Apple must have been doing it since then. I don't know what apple is doing themselves now but there are many companies which specialize in the dismantling of electronics.
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I think the main thing is that Apple is inusual in that they have both immense volumes and a very, very limited product range on a relatively large, expensive product. As a result they are probably one of the only cases where it's worth making a robot specifically to deal with dismantling one or a tiny range of different products.
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Most of that "dismantling" is either with a shredder, or shipped to the third world for hammer and open fire recycling though.
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I was triaging computers (well, signal conditioner I/O cards, and boards from backplane systems) for "repair" or "recycle" back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Because we could not get replacements, and the "new wonderful" system was 3 years overdue. The recycling company paid more if we levered the chips out of their sockets and bagged the stripped boards separately from the cards.
The day that one of our technicians atte
Re:Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction (Score:5, Insightful)
Different thing. There's two existing approaches to recycling electronics
1) Shred the electronics, then roughly sort the resulting shreds by magnets, density, size, optical properties, manual sorting etc.
2) Ship it to a third world country where children will end up recycling by dismantling with hammers and open fires.
Apple's approach is a new one. Because all the models they are recycling are there's and they know how they are constructed, they have robots reverse the process, unscrewing, unclipping and ungluing each part down to it's components. And they know exactly what's in each of those components, and the components can be recycles on mass.
This is far more efficient than the other methods, better for the environment, and doesn't damage worker's health.
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Trump 2020: Bring Unmanufacturing Back to America!
Sorry, the thought of Un-manufacturing things is pretty cool, but the bombardment of political ads made me go there...
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Not everything is about making a profit. Sometimes the doing right thing for the environment is a price worth paying.
I think that might have even been their whole idea with this, too...
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Why make it hard? Apple doesn't mind if a company uses destructive methods to pull metals out of the ground, just use some good old mercury.
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It's actually far cheaper to extract precious metals and such from e-waste than to mine it from the earth. The reason is simple - e-waste has a higher concentration of the metals than raw ore. So it's far cheaper to extract from e-waste than it is pull it out of the ground. And since it's easier, it's also less damaging
Yes ... but (Score:2)
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Just curious, but is it still cheaper once shipping to countries where manufacturing takes place is factored in?
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You can send a whole shipping container full of stuff between most countries not opposed from one another on the globe for around five grand. How many boxes of shoes can you get into a shipping container?
Re: Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction (Score:2)
If only Apple had hired somebody on-staff who understood their job as thoroughly and completely as you do.
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> Sometimes the doing right thing for the environment is a price worth paying.
right. and what do they do with the rest of the components - the ones that aren't made of gold? the ones that aren't worth using again?
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True, but if you're making a loss, that just means someone else (or you) is paying for the task. That means that eventually that money will run out, and you will have to stop doing the task. "Making a loss" is the financial equivalent of "Environmentally unstable" - you can do it for a while, maybe even a long time, but eventually have to stop doing it. And in the same way, people prefer to stop doing it NOW if it's anticipated to always make a loss, just like
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"Making a loss" is the financial equivalent of "Environmentally unsustainable"
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True, but if you're making a loss, that just means someone else (or you) is paying for the task. That means that eventually that money will run out, and you will have to stop doing the task.
That's only true if the loss on the one task is larger than your entire profit.
We recover $40 mil of gold, but at a cost of $100 mil. Okay, that's a loss on this one task. But what is that cost spread out over all those iPhones we recycled? Still a loss, but a small one per unit. Now remember that Apple is the only iPhone maker, so every one of those iPhones they recycled they also sold and made a profit on once upon a time. How much profit did they make from each iPhone back then? The loss of recycling the
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Re:Missing Detail: Cost of Extraction (Score:5, Informative)
That's the cost of following the law, being nice to environment is a side effect. Apple, as a device manufacturer is under *obligation* to recycle their phones, as long as they want to sell them in 700+ million market called Europe.
Here is quick summary of ROHS 2002/95/EC and WEEE 2002/96/EC directives: https://lwn.net/Articles/68380... [lwn.net]
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That's the cost of following the law, being nice to environment is a side effect. Apple, as a device manufacturer is under *obligation* to recycle their phones, as long as they want to sell them in 700+ million market called Europe. Here is quick summary of ROHS 2002/95/EC and WEEE 2002/96/EC directives: https://lwn.net/Articles/68380... [lwn.net]
Others follow that law by sending their stuff to Africa or China. That's lower cost.
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Yeah, if Apple send their stuff to China, the recipient would be Apple. They are manufactures from start to end of chain, they have noone to offload recycling to.
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A testing place I used to work at recovered the silver from used photographic chemicals and it added up over time. Gold is potentially easier to recover in bulk since a lot of chemicals dissolve just about everything else leaving the gold behind. Using mercury makes it even easier to got the gold
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Don't worry, next year we will see the cast of "Gold Rush, 2.0" running the remains of shredded through their washplants.
Another missing detail: Secondary Market (Score:2)
And they only spent 100M recovering the said gold. Bargain and twice the price
Your missing something. Apple's 100M effort to remove used phones from the secondary market (used) in order to reduce competition for the primary market (new) is subsidized to the amount of 40M by recycling the phones removed from the market. Plus there is a further subsidy through public relations and brand image from the greening this program offers.
And the upcoming robotic disassembly may yield to more efficient recycling/recovery than shredding and other current methods.
troy ounce (Score:3)
The troy ounce (oz t) is a unit of imperial measure, now commonly used to measure the mass (weight, in common parlance) of precious metals. One troy ounce is defined as exactly 31.1034768 g, which may be used to denote the value of a precious metal.
so that's about $39,539 (USD) per kilogram of gold.
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Accually, right now it $39.+change/g. aint metal cool? [goldprice.org] and holds its value! [youtube.com]
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Yes! Its Friday! Yes! We said the same thing. Yes! I've been drinking. Yes! Just YES! I have a chemist friend who says there is some magical chemical I can use to pull the plating off of all this hardware, but I'll have to give up all this wonderful 20 year old tech to do it...... I still haven't decided.... I'll use it someday.
Not to confuse with the avoirdupois ounce (Score:2)
The troy ounce is about 10% heavier (ratio 192/175) than the avoirdupois ounce, used for everyday purposes in the United States, which equals 28.349523125 g.
Interestingly, the wikipedia page continues with:
Troy ounces are still often used in precious metal markets in countries that otherwise use the metric system
Whereas the French page says it is in use mainly in English-speaking countries for precious metals. Yet, in a funny twist of history:
The name "troy" is first attested in 1390. Though it is often connected to a fair at the city of Troyes, France, this story may have been invented in the 18th century.
Of course, the French page does not say anything about the story being apocryphal.
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Doesn't this number sound a little high? They've recovered 61 million pounds of material? Older iphones weighed about 5 ounces, so let's say 3 phones per pound. This means they've recycled 183 million iphones?
How many iphones actually get recycled? I know I still have all of mine (actually my kids have them)
I'm calling BS
What makes you think this is only iPhones? Didn't you even read the whole summary?