Apple today announced a major expansion of its recycling programs, quadrupling the number of locations US customers can send their iPhone to be disassembled by Daisy, its recycling robot.
Daisy is a recycling robot by Apple where it will disassemble and recycle select used iPhones. The robot will recycle the iPhones returned to Best Buy stores throughout the US and KPN retailers in the Netherlands. Daisy is capable of disassembling 15 different iPhone models at the rate of 200 per hour, recovering even more important materials for re-use.
How does Recycling work at Apple?
Once materials have been recovered from Daisy, they are recycled back into the manufacturing process. For cobalt, which is a key battery material, Apple sends iPhone batteries recovered by Daisy upstream in its supply chain. They are then combined with scrap from select manufacturing sites and, for the first time, cobalt recovered through this process is used to make brand new Apple batteries. The company’s engineering of an aluminum alloy made from 100 percent recycled aluminum allows the new MacBook Air and Mac mini to have nearly half the carbon footprint of earlier models.
Apple also announced the opening of its Material Recovery Lab dedicated to discovering future recycling processes. The new 9,000-square-foot facility in Austin, Texas, will look for innovative solutions involving robotics and machine learning to improve on traditional methods like targeted disassembly, sorting and shredding. The Lab will work with Apple engineering teams as well as academia to address and propose solutions to today’s industry recycling challenges.
The number of Apple Stores and network of Authorized Service Providers has grown to over 5,000 worldwide. The company will also be celebrating Earth Day on April 22 with environmentally themed ‘Today at Apple’ sessions at all Apple Stores and will be featuring original stories and collections of apps and games on the App Store to help people honor the Earth and consider their role in the natural ecosystem.