Inside Valley – What Apple does with old iPhones
Apple wants to recycle smartphones itself. A look behind the scenes at the company's recycling facility in Texas.
In this episode of Inside Valley I visit Apple’s recycling facility outside Austin, Texas, to see how the company extracts valuable raw materials from old iPhones. A robot called Daisy takes the devices apart step by step – and exposes one of the biggest weaknesses of the modern smartphone industry.
What is at stake
Billions of old smartphones are lying in drawers worldwide – and inside them are valuable raw materials. In Germany alone more than 200 million used devices are estimated to be sitting unused, holding five tonnes of gold, 29 tonnes of silver and 1,800 tonnes of copper. Apple has developed the Daisy robot to dismantle iPhones in an unassuming factory hall outside Austin. I was given rare access to the facility.
Why recycling is so hard
Daisy can do a remarkable amount, but the hurdles are high. Smartphones are not designed with recycling in mind: firmly glued-in batteries, soldered chips, adhesive instead of screws. The recycling rate for smartphones is correspondingly low, while the waste pile grows – more than 1.4 billion devices were sold worldwide in 2021. Tom Welton, president of the Royal Society of Chemistry, warns of a global e-waste crisis: a mobile phone contains 30 raw materials; six of them could be exhausted globally within the next 100 years.
Why Apple is investing anyway
For Apple, Daisy is more than an environmental project. The company is pursuing a closed loop to reduce CO2 emissions, to become less dependent on geopolitically sensitive supply chains, and to gain access to a stock of already-extracted materials. Many of the rare earths required for smartphones come from China; Beijing has recently tightened its control over exports. Whoever can recover raw materials from old devices becomes less vulnerable to that pressure.
What this means for the industry
Daisy points in a direction that could transform the smartphone market in the long run. Manufacturers would need to design devices so that repair and disassembly become easier – the EU is pushing exactly in this direction with its right-to-repair legislation. Whoever invests early in automated recycling, as Apple is doing, not only makes itself greener but also secures access to raw materials that will become scarce and politically contested in the years ahead.
I wrote the full reportage for Handelsblatt.