US tech giant Apple was at the forefront of a large scale electronic waste collection and recycling program in 2015, whose results were announced not long ago. According to the latest Environmental Responsibility Report, Apple were able to collect a total of 27.8 tons of electronic waste, from which 1 ton of gold was recovered, along with 3 tons of silver and over 10 thousand tons of steel.
Electronic waste recycling challenges
Electronics and certain types of electrical equipment and appliances contain precious metals, as well as valuable steel components which can be extracted and salvaged for recycling and manufacturing of new products. Problem with electronic and electrical waste is that not many regions around the world have functioning legislation regarding electrical and electronic equipment. In the US and EU there are laws and regulations, and recycling programs tend to generated decent results. However, a large portion of redundant electronics and electrical equipment in developing countries still goes un-recycled.
Apple’s collection and recycling effort was indeed a large scale operation which was able to collect and salvage 71% of the total weight of Apple made devices sold to consumers in the last seven years. Most of this particular program was conducted across the state of California, but the hi-tech manufacturer is planning to expand efforts in the upcoming years. Up to date, Apple has established connections and is working with over 160 recycling operations across the world. The tech giant’s recycling partners are licensed, highly advanced recycling operations complying with all local, regional, national and international recycling and reuse regulations. Since 1994 (the first year the partnership became active), the scheme has been able to divert more than 271 thousand tons of recyclable materials from landfills all around the world.
The 2015 initiative in figures
Below is a detailed breakdown of what types of materials and metals Apple’s recycling programs were able to salvage in two thousand fifteen:
| Type | Amount |
| Steel | 10.5 tons |
| Nickel | 18 tons |
| Plastics | 6090 tons |
| Lead | 20 tons |
| Glass | 5420 tons |
| Zinc | 59 tons |
| Aluminium | 2050 tons |
| Tin | 2 tons |
| Copper | 1340 tons |
| Silver | 3 tons |
| Cobalt | 6 tons |
| Gold | 1 ton |
Improvement of electronic waste recycling technologies
Although electrical and electronic waste is widely recycled in many developed countries, the actual practices i.e. the technology used to recycle such waste is still quite inefficient and doesn’t recover all that can be salvaged from redundant electronics. In most of the time, current extraction methods are only able to separate and extracts only some metals and materials from redundant devices, and there is much room for improvement if electronic waste recycling is to achieve its full potential. Another major problem with current extraction methods is that technology in use usually diminishes the quality of extracted materials in the process. In an effort to improve some of this, Apple have developed Liam – a robot specially engineered to dismantle redundant iPhones, and extract valuable metals and materials from them. Currently Liam robots are operating in California and The Netherlands.
