Strange Days sez: "And for long-life, my previous iMac went 8 years before something on the logic board failed. At that point machines were so much better (including the screens!) that there was no question I'd replace it and recycle the old one. And, the new one uses *10 pounds less* in materials, a full third of the 2011's weight. This is great for everyone."
Yup! I'm using a 5K iMac at my shop, but my 12 y.o. late 2007, 24" iMac is doing everything I need at home. Including reading and writing the occasional disc I have to deal with. Also, my 2013 MBA is doing just fine, as is my SE.
It's a feel-good move by Apple to save money when building new products. It if ever "closed loop" the company will be dying out because if you have enough coming in to support what you are selling then you are not selling enough product and/or people are buying another brands product.
Not true. If your installedbase is an order of magnitude larger than what you produce every year. Currently, that base is approaching 2 billion devices in active use. That's active use, not devices that have been thrown away or recycled. Apple produces about 300 million devices a year... There are enough devices in the wild to sustain becoming a closed-loop manufacturer for years to come - provided that consumers turn their old devices into Apple for recycling.
It's a feel-good move by Apple to save money when building new products. It if ever "closed loop" the company will be dying out because if you have enough coming in to support what you are selling then you are not selling enough product and/or people are buying another brands product.
Ah, with almost 1 billion iPhone smartphones in active use, and Apple selling typically 190-200 million smartphones annually, turnover of just 20% of the existing iPhones every year (on a 4 year life cycle) could conceivably supply most of their need if highly efficient. Think of how much more they material they could get if they started to recycle Android phones?
That 4 year cycle is probably going to expand to 5 or so, but not much more. It is the reason why Apple is pushing services, and why they can - as you said - recycle their products.
Device repair outfit iFixit chief executive suggests "There's this ego that believes they can get all their minerals back, and it's not possible."
This quote from the ifixit CEO makes it seem that he and Lisa Jackson have different understandings of what closed loop manufacturing means. Or perhaps he is too deep in his own beliefs to think it is possible?
Then, maybe the quote is taken out of context as surely he thinks that having 20, 30, 50% use of recycled materials is better than 0%.
This article has the headline stating it's to "end" mining, instead of a more reasonable reduction. I don't know if that's something Apple has stated or if how AI interpreted a desire to reduce mining, but as Apple grows in unit sales and into more product offerings, not to mention the number of devices that stay in use for years to come, even if they were Apple to use 100% of recycled material they'd still need to source outside their own device chain.
Regardless of what Apple can achieve, this is a great thing.
100% recycled material would in fact be an end to mining at least for Apple. Where that recycled material comes from is immaterial as it wouldn’t be from mining which is the whole point.
If Apple could get this technology into the hands of the autoindustry then that would be a major coup for the planet.
In developed countries in the EU, the auto-industry is further ahead when it comes to applying mass controlled destruction processes than Apple who is still demo-ing its single, small scale destruction robots that still hasn’t reached scale after all these years.
It's a feel-good move by Apple to save money when building new products. It if ever "closed loop" the company will be dying out because if you have enough coming in to support what you are selling then you are not selling enough product and/or people are buying another brands product.
Not true. If your installedbase is an order of magnitude larger than what you produce every year. Currently, that base is approaching 2 billion devices in active use. That's active use, not devices that have been thrown away or recycled. Apple produces about 300 million devices a year... There are enough devices in the wild to sustain becoming a closed-loop manufacturer for years to come - provided that consumers turn their old devices into Apple for recycling.
I'd like to see your break down year by year for sustainability. Even your last sentence betrays your claim of a "closed loop" with a statement about it only being "years to come," not indefinitely, and with an "if" caveat of consumers recycling old devices.
I don't see the numbers working out. Even if we assume that Apple can recycle 100% of the device—and excluding plastics, oils, glues, paper, and countless other things that goes into your loaded statement about it being "closed-loop"—I don't see how Apple can grow their user base and keep using the same recycled metals without reducing the amount of metal being used.
Assuming that the amount of the recycled metal is the same YoY indefinitely (even though we know the iPhones have grown in size and have changed metals) and that it's a 100% recyclable without any concern for cost of getting to 100%: If you start with a-install base, b-unit sales for 2020 with a c-percentage growth rate per annum, and adding back every iPhone after d-years, how long until you'll have to start to open this loop you created?
Let's say there are 2 billion devices in use and 250 million sold in 2019 to make that base with a increase with a 10% increase for 2020 you have 275 million sold but have to reduce the install base by 13.75% to get it. What equation did you come up with where you never run out of supply? I ran a large variety of complex scenarios using Soulver with nary a one having the result you claim.
As a person who cares a lot about these issues, I was at first totally impressed by this recycling robot stuff at Apple. I love robots and I love the notion of reclaiming materials.
However, as a person who really does care a lot about these issues (and therefore pays attention to the finer details), I realized Apple’s robots are indeed largely a publicity thing.
Apple are not the good guys here. They just market themselves as the good guys, and we believe them, because the marketing is powerful and because they do some good things. However, Apple don’t do most of the good things they could and should be doing. They fall well below the image they seem to be buying with marketing.
There’s so much waste by Apple:
• Apple sells short-life products, per their own efforts to get us to buy new things as rapidly as possible. They intentionally and arbitrarily abandon software updates on older devices (Snow Leopard is proof that a new version of an OS can be more compact and more efficient than all of its predecessors, and Apple hasn’t repeated that since, because Snow Leopard was merely the side-benefit of developing iOS). Apple are one of the typical cases of computer industry efforts at focusing only on selling new products, not on making existing ones continue to operate effectively. OS “Upgrades” are tools to sell more product, not improvements to the existing products.
• Apple has environmentally-horrible packaging. Their luxurious packaging uses too many (and wastes new) materials. They present PR that’s basically about subsidizing the logging industry, rather than using post-consumer paper. They use needless piles of non-recyclable plastic films (while technically recyclable, there’s almost zero infrastructure for plastic film recycling in the USA, because of capitalism) to wrap products and accessories.
• Apple’s products are designed-as-disposable. Yes, that’s what you’re making when you sell products that depend on sealed-in rechargeable batteries, which are inaccessible to customer replacement (even making it impossible to replace without literally rebuilding and refurbishing the product with some brand new materials). This is especially egregious in products that don’t need to be wireless! It’s not just batteries, though: the non-modular, and inaccessible nature of their products means that any failure of any kind means a likely monolithic replacement if not a replacement of the entire device. There is proof that fewer connectors and joints results in better reliability, but the environmental impact here of disposable electronics is worth backing off a bit on the monolithic design.
• IFixit (yes I know people here despise them, but they make relevant points we need to consider about Apple’s environmental impact), recently wrote about iPhones/iPads being shredded or disassembled instead of being resold for second-hand ownership due to activation lock. Macs with T2 chips are in line for the same treatment. This is a problem. We cannot trash the environment for the sake of absolutist data security. I know you guys malign iFixIt as having self-interest in the second-hand market, but this is still a relevant issue. Manufacturing new devices serves Apple, while second-hand ownership does not. Manufacturing new products to sell to customers uses far more more materials and energy than does the reuse of existing, intact products.
Some of the problem is the culture of waste in the USA. It’s not just the obsession with having new gadgets; we barely recycle anything anymore. I don’t just mean people are lazy jerks about recycling (my neighbor is a perfect example of that). As a nation, we literally do not have recycling systems in place for most materials. Incinerator-selling corporations are actively competing against recycling systems. The collected materials aren’t going anywhere now that China has decided to stop taking our single-stream waste (basically the recyclable materials were useless the way we collect and ship them out; it’s entirely our own fault). The recycling we were doing was minimal even before that. Most plastics don’t get reused. Recyclers don’t want them because buyers of these plastics aren’t interested in most of the types of plastic going through the system (and manufacturers are a huge part of the problem by choosing the cheapest and least recyclable materials for packaging). The incinerators want to burn it, as it makes “great fuel” to keep incinerators burning (“waste to energy” is a propaganda meme; it’s just waste, and it’s incredibly damaging to the environment).
Our recycling efforts have sucked due to capitalist laziness and greed in the actual recycling business, and, yes, also because of citizens not giving a damn... But Apple, and every other manufacturer (and most businesses that have any kind of consumables), does far more damage in this regard than individual citizens. The sheer scale of waste put out by businesses (who aren’t usually required by their regional governments to do recycling at all, when the citizens areexpected to) far eclipses the waste put out by individuals.
Ad Council propaganda on recycling and “good for the planet” activities is always aimed at individual citizens. That’s how the Ad Council protects corporations from responsibility; that’s what they exist for: propaganda. It literally was founded as a propaganda department; it used to be called “The War Council”. Despite their PR efforts, reality stays the same: the largest abuses of the environment, and the actual places that could make the most impact in halting our environmental destruction, are at the corporate level.
Apple are not just an example of this; Apple are a major part of the problem.
If this feel-good PR (disassembly robots, data centers powered by batteries and carbon offset credits, etc) leaves you content, you’re not paying enough attention. You are allowed to like Apple and Apple products if they make your life better in some way, but you really ought to be demanding more from them on environmental issues than expensive PR.
TLDR most of your uninformed rant, but your bolded sentences are full of shit.
- Apple's devices have the longest useful lifespans in the biz, which is why they have the highest resale value. My old devices become hand-me-downs for years.
- Their packaging is the best I've ever seen and is basically just cardboard and highly recyclable (seriously what's wrong with you?).
- Not readily user-serviceable isn't the same disposable -- I've both done my own repairs, and brought them in for repairs. And when finally shot, drop them off (or send them back for free) to be recycled.
- And your last paragraph -- nuts. If you believe Apple's comprehensive, industry-leading policies and actions on environmental concerns are just PR, then you haven't been paying attention.
Have Apple eliminated all the unnecessary packaging I’ve seen in every Apple product I’ve ever bought? The plastic film especially? Because like I said, it’s new materials and plastic film is not generally recycled. Can you explain to me why it’s not a valid criticism to point out that Apple use unnecessary plastic films and new materials for packaging instead of post-consumer materials? The whole point of my dissertation was that WE AS A COUNTRY ARE NOT RECYCLING. It doesn’t matter if some of Apple’s packaging is “highly recyclable”.
You’re being defensive instead of really absorbing the details here. YOU are the uniformed. You couldn’t even notice where I said Apple does do good things. All you saw is criticism and you refuse to examine it.
As a person who cares a lot about these issues, I was at first totally impressed by this recycling robot stuff at Apple. I love robots and I love the notion of reclaiming materials.
However, as a person who really does care a lot about these issues (and therefore pays attention to the finer details), I realized Apple’s robots are indeed largely a publicity thing.
Apple are not the good guys here. They just market themselves as the good guys, and we believe them, because the marketing is powerful and because they do some good things. However, Apple don’t do most of the good things they could and should be doing. They fall well below the image they seem to be buying with marketing.
There’s so much waste by Apple:
• Apple sells short-life products, per their own efforts to get us to buy new things as rapidly as possible. They intentionally and arbitrarily abandon software updates on older devices (Snow Leopard is proof that a new version of an OS can be more compact and more efficient than all of its predecessors, and Apple hasn’t repeated that since, because Snow Leopard was merely the side-benefit of developing iOS). Apple are one of the typical cases of computer industry efforts at focusing only on selling new products, not on making existing ones continue to operate effectively. OS “Upgrades” are tools to sell more product, not improvements to the existing products.
• Apple has environmentally-horrible packaging. Their luxurious packaging uses too many (and wastes new) materials. They present PR that’s basically about subsidizing the logging industry, rather than using post-consumer paper. They use needless piles of non-recyclable plastic films (while technically recyclable, there’s almost zero infrastructure for plastic film recycling in the USA, because of capitalism) to wrap products and accessories.
• Apple’s products are designed-as-disposable. Yes, that’s what you’re making when you sell products that depend on sealed-in rechargeable batteries, which are inaccessible to customer replacement (even making it impossible to replace without literally rebuilding and refurbishing the product with some brand new materials). This is especially egregious in products that don’t need to be wireless! It’s not just batteries, though: the non-modular, and inaccessible nature of their products means that any failure of any kind means a likely monolithic replacement if not a replacement of the entire device. There is proof that fewer connectors and joints results in better reliability, but the environmental impact here of disposable electronics is worth backing off a bit on the monolithic design.
• IFixit (yes I know people here despise them, but they make relevant points we need to consider about Apple’s environmental impact), recently wrote about iPhones/iPads being shredded or disassembled instead of being resold for second-hand ownership due to activation lock. Macs with T2 chips are in line for the same treatment. This is a problem. We cannot trash the environment for the sake of absolutist data security. I know you guys malign iFixIt as having self-interest in the second-hand market, but this is still a relevant issue. Manufacturing new devices serves Apple, while second-hand ownership does not. Manufacturing new products to sell to customers uses far more more materials and energy than does the reuse of existing, intact products.
Some of the problem is the culture of waste in the USA. It’s not just the obsession with having new gadgets; we barely recycle anything anymore. I don’t just mean people are lazy jerks about recycling (my neighbor is a perfect example of that). As a nation, we literally do not have recycling systems in place for most materials. Incinerator-selling corporations are actively competing against recycling systems. The collected materials aren’t going anywhere now that China has decided to stop taking our single-stream waste (basically the recyclable materials were useless the way we collect and ship them out; it’s entirely our own fault). The recycling we were doing was minimal even before that. Most plastics don’t get reused. Recyclers don’t want them because buyers of these plastics aren’t interested in most of the types of plastic going through the system (and manufacturers are a huge part of the problem by choosing the cheapest and least recyclable materials for packaging). The incinerators want to burn it, as it makes “great fuel” to keep incinerators burning (“waste to energy” is a propaganda meme; it’s just waste, and it’s incredibly damaging to the environment).
Our recycling efforts have sucked due to capitalist laziness and greed in the actual recycling business, and, yes, also because of citizens not giving a damn... But Apple, and every other manufacturer (and most businesses that have any kind of consumables), does far more damage in this regard than individual citizens. The sheer scale of waste put out by businesses (who aren’t usually required by their regional governments to do recycling at all, when the citizens areexpected to) far eclipses the waste put out by individuals.
Ad Council propaganda on recycling and “good for the planet” activities is always aimed at individual citizens. That’s how the Ad Council protects corporations from responsibility; that’s what they exist for: propaganda. It literally was founded as a propaganda department; it used to be called “The War Council”. Despite their PR efforts, reality stays the same: the largest abuses of the environment, and the actual places that could make the most impact in halting our environmental destruction, are at the corporate level.
Apple are not just an example of this; Apple are a major part of the problem.
If this feel-good PR (disassembly robots, data centers powered by batteries and carbon offset credits, etc) leaves you content, you’re not paying enough attention. You are allowed to like Apple and Apple products if they make your life better in some way, but you really ought to be demanding more from them on environmental issues than expensive PR.
So many assumptions. I’ll just touch on a few.
Short-life products. That’s a consumer demand that will always exist in new technology. A tech company that makes any computer device with an expected, say, ten-year lifespan will fail. If Apple was still selling the iPhone 3GS, they would go out of business.
Sealed batteries. The assumption here is that devices with consumer-accessible batteries would be kept longer, thus lowering the negative environmental impact. In truth, it would actually result in a huge market for third-party batteries. Rather than keeping devices charged, consumers would buy multiple cheap batteries so they could swap them out a few times a day. (If you’re old enough to have had a pre-iPhone cell phone, you probably did this.) Lots of those batteries would end up lost or tossed in the trash. As it is now, you can get your iPhone battery replaced at an Apple store where it will be recovered through their recycling program, or at least a third-party shop where it’s more likely to be recycled than would consumer-swappable batteries. The same scenario is true if considering consumer swappable memory or other hardware upgrades. “Right to repair” is not the Shangri-La people think it is. The old days of shade-tre mechanics working on cars was the old days of shade-tree mechanics dumping oil out on the ground or into the storm sewers.
Recycling. Much has been written about this recently. The problem with recycling is not so much about consumers’ failure to do their duty. It’s about manufacturers externalizing costs and responsibility to the consumer. Back in the day, you could bring your milk and soda bottles back to the grocery store, and there was a system for cleaning and reusing them. That was all replaced with disposable plastic, shifting costs and responsibility to the consumer. The idea that Apple is creating a closed-loop system for recovering materials from devices is actually a rare example of a manufacturer re-absorbing costs and responsibility from the consumer. It’s not a leap to assume that their manufacturing design will take into account the requirements of their disassembly and recovery processes.
No Apple’s not perfect, and there’s certainly a PR component to this, but Apple doesn’t do things like this just as fluff.
No, I didn’t handle the battery often on my flip phone. I only ever had the one. But the device didn’t need to be potentially destroyed pealing it open to replace the battery, as my iPad Pro will need to be if I’m the one who takes it to Apple for a battery replacement. Yes, I could do it myself on my iPhone 4, and maybe my iPhone 6s, but Apple doesn’t want me to and I don’t want to risk damaging the phone just to try. In fact, my iPhone 4 still acts like the battery is fine and it lasts way longer than the one in my newer and larger iPhone 6s...
How long before Apple won’t want to do the work? I keep my devices longer than they service them. That’s the second-biggest reason to allow third-party repairs and to make things repairable. The first-biggest reason being simply the environmental issue that’s at the core of this topic.
On reuse: My iPhone 1 was turned over to a girlfriend for continued use. She didn’t want anything other than a phone and it served that purpose for years. The damn thing even survived being run through the wash. It was only put to pasture last year. That’s old Apple.
My iPhone 4 seems perfectly fine, I just can’t cope with how slow the iOS updates made it and how bloated websites won’t work on it. It’s just an iPod now. It works well enough for me as such. I’ll continue to use it that way until I cannot. That’s also old Apple.
My iPhone 6s, however, is constantly needing to be charged, and that’s with a NEW battery, replaced under Apple’s free battery replacement program last year. My usage has not changed. It’s actually been reduced, compared to my prior phones, because I also have an iPad that takes some of the usage time. Battery-wise, my 6s is way worse off than prior devices and this is a trend that has been continuing, not reversing. That’s new Apple.
It’s true that most customers don’t think about materials usage. Apple takes that and turns it into a sales opportunity. Most people will see a declining battery as a reason to throw away a difficult-to-service device and buy a new one. Even people like me who do care about the issue find ourselves not enabled to do much about it. That’s a choice that’s been made for us. If you think that’s not something Apple prefers... Not only does Apple sell more new devices, they also now make money reselling the phones that their customers give back to Apple when they buy new ones. It’s not for the environmental or materials usage issue. It’s money that is otherwise left on the table, or lost to someone else. That’s what this supply chain management is all about.
Actually, a lot of your reply sounds like you agree with me... when I’m not talking about Apple in specific. Yes, Apple do stand out from the average American manufacturer. I used to be all in on believing in Apple doing the right thing. I’m all for Apple putting leg behind lip about materials usage. So far, it really is just PR, and their wasteful designs and packaging are the tell. I’m pointing out that they’re not doing all they COULD and SHOULD be doing. If they want me to believe, they need to actually do the work. Right now it is so selective as to be clearly seen for the PR and profit-only motivation that it is. Ethics aren’t about doing something seemingly positive just because it offers more profit. It’s about doing the right thing, regardless.
Believe me, I WANT Apple doing the right thing. That’s WHY I am presenting criticism and calling out where Apple is clearly not doing the best for the issue of materials use. I have actively shared these critiques with Apple, so it’s not like I’m expecting them to hear me here. This commentary is for anyone willing to look beyond their knee-jerk desire to defend Apple.
I could rant about other companies I liked, doing stupid shit with materials usage, like Newman’s Own brand of food products: They donate all their profits to charity, so it really shocked me when they suddenly showed how frelling clueless they are about petroleum usage and started selling their tomato sauce in PLASTIC jars instead of glass (they’re awful plastic jars too, since they’re ribbed; you can’t empty them effectively). It’s offensive to me as a person that gives a shit about us not wasting petroleum on disposable plastic packaging, especially where glass will do (glass is not rare, and it is inert, just in case it ends up dumped somewhere).
Plastic packaging is literally as wasteful as burning this precious and finite resource inside internal combustion engines (especially when incinerator companies are incentivizing local governments they’ve sold their money-losing incinerators to to NOT recycle, and to dump the plastics into the incinerator instead).
The healthcare system, for example, needs these materials far more than a tomato sauce seller... just like healthcare is in competition for the finite helium that people waste in frelling party balloons (MRI machines are vital for diagnostics and they consume helium).
Any company that claims to care about ethical, environmental, pro-social behaviors... especially if they’re going to beat their drum and toot their horn about it... needs to do all they can, and do it earnestly. Otherwise, yeah, I’m going to come criticizing their disingenuous PR. I don’t have children of my own, but I give a damn about the future wellbeing of the people who will live long after me. When our current generations have wasted all the resources... Have you seen the TV series Max Headroom? “20 Minutes Into The Future” is going to be the real world soon enough if we keep letting corporations waste materials like this just to pursue the insane goal of perpetual gains.
it looks to me like Dysamoria is complaining about the original iPhone lasting until last year, a 4S that’s still working and an iPhone 6S that got a cheap replacement battery and also works.
In that length of time most android users would have replaced their devices 5 times or more.
Of course android phones didn’t exist when the original iPhone was released so I’m actually compensating for that; from what I’m able to work out the replacement cycle is 2 years for an android device - in the US - and 4 years for the iPhone. That’s a big carbon saving as the majority of carbon costs are in the manufacture.
Dysamoria, completely different phones, iPhone 1 didn’t have multitasking, background processing, LTE, high resolution camera, higher memory, or faster processor. We have a 6 and 6s. They work fine. If phones had replaceable items like some people want, they won’t last as long.
Believe me, I WANT Apple doing the right thing. That’s WHY I am presenting criticism and calling out where Apple is clearly not doing the best for the issue of materials use. I have actively shared these critiques with Apple, so it’s not like I’m expecting them to hear me here. This commentary is for anyone willing to look beyond their knee-jerk desire to defend Apple.
We all want Apple to do better. Nobody here doesn’t want that, and Apple is doing better with stated goals that are more than where they are now.
You accused them of green washing in an earlier post:
Apple are not the good guys here. They just market themselves as the good guys, and we believe them, because the marketing is powerful and because they do some good things. However, Apple don’t do most of the good things they could and should be doing. They fall well below the image they seem to be buying with marketing.
This is a pretty whacked out statement and it seems you are looking at the glass half empty while it is really half full and rising. I can’t treat you seriously when you are characterizing the problem like this. For example, you are criticizing Apple for using plastic in the packaging as an example of green washing, but you ignore that when someone buys a new Apple product, the packaging is mostly cardboard or paper, the product is mostly aluminum, glass, and the computing bits, while the plastic is a minuscule fraction of the package.
Not only that, they are gradually using more and more recycled materials in their products, including recycled plastic, bio-plastic, recycled tin, recycled rare Earth metals, recycled aluminum, so on and so forth, all with increasingly lower emissions to produce the product, and probably lower toxicity too. Yes, they can do better, and they have a goal of closed loop manufacturing after all.
Desigining for 3rd party repairability is good thing, Apple should do it, but look at the trajectory Apple is on. They are designing their products using mostly recyclable materials and are increasingly using recycled materials themselves. They have very long lasting products, with a lot of second, third owner use of their product. Likely among the best there, and they are addressing the problem for end of life too. The Daisy robot is basically a prototype, whose capability and functions are increasing through time. 200 iPhones per hour doesn’t sound like a lot, but that’s 1.7m phones per year going 365x7x24. They only need to build 10 to 20 machines, increase its production rate by a factor of 2, and they are hitting 30m to 40m iPhones a year. That’s putting a dent into the problem with the robot work.
Maybe you don’t think they will get there, but time is definitely needed to improve the processing to recover materials, the processing to recycle materials, to change people’s habits liking turning a dead iPhone in back to Apple. They have been saying there are using recycled this or that material in new products. I definitely think this trend is only going to increase.
it looks to me like Dysamoria is complaining about the original iPhone lasting until last year, a 4S that’s still working and an iPhone 6S that got a cheap replacement battery and also works.
In that length of time most android users would have replaced their devices 5 times or more.
Of course android phones didn’t exist when the original iPhone was released so I’m actually compensating for that; from what I’m able to work out the replacement cycle is 2 years for an android device - in the US - and 4 years for the iPhone. That’s a big carbon saving as the majority of carbon costs are in the manufacture.
Heck, I have a first gen iPhone and the only problem with it is that the power button does not respond. That means I have to wait for the screen to naturally turn off based on my settings. It still works!
Apart from the iPhone XR (opted for the XS Max) and the iPhone 11 (opted for the 11 Pro Max), I have every model of the iPhone and all of them are in working order.
Short-life products is the exact opposite of what you would call these products.
It's a feel-good move by Apple to save money when building new products. It if ever "closed loop" the company will be dying out because if you have enough coming in to support what you are selling then you are not selling enough product and/or people are buying another brands product.
Not true. If your installedbase is an order of magnitude larger than what you produce every year. Currently, that base is approaching 2 billion devices in active use. That's active use, not devices that have been thrown away or recycled. Apple produces about 300 million devices a year... There are enough devices in the wild to sustain becoming a closed-loop manufacturer for years to come - provided that consumers turn their old devices into Apple for recycling.
I'd like to see your break down year by year for sustainability. Even your last sentence betrays your claim of a "closed loop" with a statement about it only being "years to come," not indefinitely, and with an "if" caveat of consumers recycling old devices.
I don't see the numbers working out. Even if we assume that Apple can recycle 100% of the device—and excluding plastics, oils, glues, paper, and countless other things that goes into your loaded statement about it being "closed-loop"—I don't see how Apple can grow their user base and keep using the same recycled metals without reducing the amount of metal being used.
Assuming that the amount of the recycled metal is the same YoY indefinitely (even though we know the iPhones have grown in size and have changed metals) and that it's a 100% recyclable without any concern for cost of getting to 100%: If you start with a-install base, b-unit sales for 2020 with a c-percentage growth rate per annum, and adding back every iPhone after d-years, how long until you'll have to start to open this loop you created?
Let's say there are 2 billion devices in use and 250 million sold in 2019 to make that base with a increase with a 10% increase for 2020 you have 275 million sold but have to reduce the install base by 13.75% to get it. What equation did you come up with where you never run out of supply? I ran a large variety of complex scenarios using Soulver with nary a one having the result you claim.
You missed the part where the recycled material Apple uses for new devices, does not have to come from a recycled Apple device.
It's a feel-good move by Apple to save money when building new products. It if ever "closed loop" the company will be dying out because if you have enough coming in to support what you are selling then you are not selling enough product and/or people are buying another brands product.
Not true. If your installedbase is an order of magnitude larger than what you produce every year. Currently, that base is approaching 2 billion devices in active use. That's active use, not devices that have been thrown away or recycled. Apple produces about 300 million devices a year... There are enough devices in the wild to sustain becoming a closed-loop manufacturer for years to come - provided that consumers turn their old devices into Apple for recycling.
I'd like to see your break down year by year for sustainability. Even your last sentence betrays your claim of a "closed loop" with a statement about it only being "years to come," not indefinitely, and with an "if" caveat of consumers recycling old devices.
I don't see the numbers working out. Even if we assume that Apple can recycle 100% of the device—and excluding plastics, oils, glues, paper, and countless other things that goes into your loaded statement about it being "closed-loop"—I don't see how Apple can grow their user base and keep using the same recycled metals without reducing the amount of metal being used.
Assuming that the amount of the recycled metal is the same YoY indefinitely (even though we know the iPhones have grown in size and have changed metals) and that it's a 100% recyclable without any concern for cost of getting to 100%: If you start with a-install base, b-unit sales for 2020 with a c-percentage growth rate per annum, and adding back every iPhone after d-years, how long until you'll have to start to open this loop you created?
Let's say there are 2 billion devices in use and 250 million sold in 2019 to make that base with a increase with a 10% increase for 2020 you have 275 million sold but have to reduce the install base by 13.75% to get it. What equation did you come up with where you never run out of supply? I ran a large variety of complex scenarios using Soulver with nary a one having the result you claim.
You missed the part where the recycled material Apple uses for new devices, does not have to come from a recycled Apple device.
1) That's not a closed loop within Apple, that's just recycled.
2) If Apple gets to buy and use old devices from other CE makers—how many of them are using aluminum or steal cases?—to use for their devices so they can maintain 100% recycled material, what are others doing for their devices? How does another player move to also achieve the same goal if they can't even use their own devices because Apple is using them all? This means that mining I still going on to keep up with demand, and it's potentially even worse now because Apple will no longer need to be involved with keeping the mines safe and ethical with your scenario. So how exactly is the world a better place?
3) Again, this notion you've asserted that Apple can be 100% closed loop is impossible, even if if's something one should actively strive for, not unlike how we keep working toward perpetual motion for unlimited energy. It's not reasonable to say Apple will invent this, but it is reasonable that we should try to push as close as possible.
As a person who cares a lot about these issues, I was at first totally impressed by this recycling robot stuff at Apple. I love robots and I love the notion of reclaiming materials.
However, as a person who really does care a lot about these issues (and therefore pays attention to the finer details), I realized Apple’s robots are indeed largely a publicity thing.
Apple are not the good guys here. They just market themselves as the good guys, and we believe them, because the marketing is powerful and because they do some good things. However, Apple don’t do most of the good things they could and should be doing. They fall well below the image they seem to be buying with marketing.
There’s so much waste by Apple:
• Apple sells short-life products, per their own efforts to get us to buy new things as rapidly as possible. They intentionally and arbitrarily abandon software updates on older devices (Snow Leopard is proof that a new version of an OS can be more compact and more efficient than all of its predecessors, and Apple hasn’t repeated that since, because Snow Leopard was merely the side-benefit of developing iOS). Apple are one of the typical cases of computer industry efforts at focusing only on selling new products, not on making existing ones continue to operate effectively. OS “Upgrades” are tools to sell more product, not improvements to the existing products.
• Apple has environmentally-horrible packaging. Their luxurious packaging uses too many (and wastes new) materials. They present PR that’s basically about subsidizing the logging industry, rather than using post-consumer paper. They use needless piles of non-recyclable plastic films (while technically recyclable, there’s almost zero infrastructure for plastic film recycling in the USA, because of capitalism) to wrap products and accessories.
• Apple’s products are designed-as-disposable. Yes, that’s what you’re making when you sell products that depend on sealed-in rechargeable batteries, which are inaccessible to customer replacement (even making it impossible to replace without literally rebuilding and refurbishing the product with some brand new materials). This is especially egregious in products that don’t need to be wireless! It’s not just batteries, though: the non-modular, and inaccessible nature of their products means that any failure of any kind means a likely monolithic replacement if not a replacement of the entire device. There is proof that fewer connectors and joints results in better reliability, but the environmental impact here of disposable electronics is worth backing off a bit on the monolithic design.
• IFixit (yes I know people here despise them, but they make relevant points we need to consider about Apple’s environmental impact), recently wrote about iPhones/iPads being shredded or disassembled instead of being resold for second-hand ownership due to activation lock. Macs with T2 chips are in line for the same treatment. This is a problem. We cannot trash the environment for the sake of absolutist data security. I know you guys malign iFixIt as having self-interest in the second-hand market, but this is still a relevant issue. Manufacturing new devices serves Apple, while second-hand ownership does not. Manufacturing new products to sell to customers uses far more more materials and energy than does the reuse of existing, intact products.
Some of the problem is the culture of waste in the USA. It’s not just the obsession with having new gadgets; we barely recycle anything anymore. I don’t just mean people are lazy jerks about recycling (my neighbor is a perfect example of that). As a nation, we literally do not have recycling systems in place for most materials. Incinerator-selling corporations are actively competing against recycling systems. The collected materials aren’t going anywhere now that China has decided to stop taking our single-stream waste (basically the recyclable materials were useless the way we collect and ship them out; it’s entirely our own fault). The recycling we were doing was minimal even before that. Most plastics don’t get reused. Recyclers don’t want them because buyers of these plastics aren’t interested in most of the types of plastic going through the system (and manufacturers are a huge part of the problem by choosing the cheapest and least recyclable materials for packaging). The incinerators want to burn it, as it makes “great fuel” to keep incinerators burning (“waste to energy” is a propaganda meme; it’s just waste, and it’s incredibly damaging to the environment).
Our recycling efforts have sucked due to capitalist laziness and greed in the actual recycling business, and, yes, also because of citizens not giving a damn... But Apple, and every other manufacturer (and most businesses that have any kind of consumables), does far more damage in this regard than individual citizens. The sheer scale of waste put out by businesses (who aren’t usually required by their regional governments to do recycling at all, when the citizens areexpected to) far eclipses the waste put out by individuals.
Ad Council propaganda on recycling and “good for the planet” activities is always aimed at individual citizens. That’s how the Ad Council protects corporations from responsibility; that’s what they exist for: propaganda. It literally was founded as a propaganda department; it used to be called “The War Council”. Despite their PR efforts, reality stays the same: the largest abuses of the environment, and the actual places that could make the most impact in halting our environmental destruction, are at the corporate level.
Apple are not just an example of this; Apple are a major part of the problem.
If this feel-good PR (disassembly robots, data centers powered by batteries and carbon offset credits, etc) leaves you content, you’re not paying enough attention. You are allowed to like Apple and Apple products if they make your life better in some way, but you really ought to be demanding more from them on environmental issues than expensive PR.
On the packaging, they are using recycled paper + they give money to NGO's that manage the forest for the part where they need raw material ... so the packing is made of part recycle and part "sustained forest". All in the goal of moving towards a better world, are they there yet, NO, are they working towards it absolutely.
Before you all go off thinking things are worse than they ever have been, you need to check your perspective, it is wrong and most likely very short sighted. Here is a good article based on research being done by a number of universities and it shows things are in fact getting better.
A couple of note worthy examples and there are lots of them like this, in 1959 the soda can weight 65gm of AL today it is only 13gm most that is recycled content, prior to this it was made of steel and not recycled. In the last 50 yrs the world has retired 65% of the land needed to feed the world and the population has more than doubled. Farming has become more efficient. This was done by improving crops, but the people who complain about GMO and what locally grown everything which required more resources and land. There are plenty of example like this as well. Be careful what you complain about the solution could be far worse.
Just keep in mind Apple put a computer in everyone's pocket, we are almost to the point where you may not need a desk top computer, think the resources needed to make a desktop computer verse an iPhone or ipad.
Can Daisy recover cobalt, or will Apple’s suppliers still rely on children to mine that for them?
How about reading TFA?
“ The Daisy recycling robot is part of the plan to close the loop, with the machine used to recoup 14 materials from old iPhones including aluminum, tin, cobalt, and rare earths.”
Comments
"And for long-life, my previous iMac went 8 years before something on the logic board failed. At that point machines were so much better (including the screens!) that there was no question I'd replace it and recycle the old one. And, the new one uses *10 pounds less* in materials, a full third of the 2011's weight. This is great for everyone."
Yup!
I'm using a 5K iMac at my shop, but my 12 y.o. late 2007, 24" iMac is doing everything I need at home. Including reading and writing the occasional disc I have to deal with.
Also, my 2013 MBA is doing just fine, as is my SE.
Not true. If your installed base is an order of magnitude larger than what you produce every year. Currently, that base is approaching 2 billion devices in active use. That's active use, not devices that have been thrown away or recycled. Apple produces about 300 million devices a year... There are enough devices in the wild to sustain becoming a closed-loop manufacturer for years to come - provided that consumers turn their old devices into Apple for recycling.
I don't see the numbers working out. Even if we assume that Apple can recycle 100% of the device—and excluding plastics, oils, glues, paper, and countless other things that goes into your loaded statement about it being "closed-loop"—I don't see how Apple can grow their user base and keep using the same recycled metals without reducing the amount of metal being used.
Assuming that the amount of the recycled metal is the same YoY indefinitely (even though we know the iPhones have grown in size and have changed metals) and that it's a 100% recyclable without any concern for cost of getting to 100%: If you start with a-install base, b-unit sales for 2020 with a c-percentage growth rate per annum, and adding back every iPhone after d-years, how long until you'll have to start to open this loop you created?
Let's say there are 2 billion devices in use and 250 million sold in 2019 to make that base with a increase with a 10% increase for 2020 you have 275 million sold but have to reduce the install base by 13.75% to get it. What equation did you come up with where you never run out of supply? I ran a large variety of complex scenarios using Soulver with nary a one having the result you claim.
Have Apple eliminated all the unnecessary packaging I’ve seen in every Apple product I’ve ever bought? The plastic film especially? Because like I said, it’s new materials and plastic film is not generally recycled. Can you explain to me why it’s not a valid criticism to point out that Apple use unnecessary plastic films and new materials for packaging instead of post-consumer materials? The whole point of my dissertation was that WE AS A COUNTRY ARE NOT RECYCLING. It doesn’t matter if some of Apple’s packaging is “highly recyclable”.
You’re being defensive instead of really absorbing the details here. YOU are the uniformed. You couldn’t even notice where I said Apple does do good things. All you saw is criticism and you refuse to examine it.
No, I didn’t handle the battery often on my flip phone. I only ever had the one. But the device didn’t need to be potentially destroyed pealing it open to replace the battery, as my iPad Pro will need to be if I’m the one who takes it to Apple for a battery replacement. Yes, I could do it myself on my iPhone 4, and maybe my iPhone 6s, but Apple doesn’t want me to and I don’t want to risk damaging the phone just to try. In fact, my iPhone 4 still acts like the battery is fine and it lasts way longer than the one in my newer and larger iPhone 6s...
How long before Apple won’t want to do the work? I keep my devices longer than they service them. That’s the second-biggest reason to allow third-party repairs and to make things repairable. The first-biggest reason being simply the environmental issue that’s at the core of this topic.
On reuse: My iPhone 1 was turned over to a girlfriend for continued use. She didn’t want anything other than a phone and it served that purpose for years. The damn thing even survived being run through the wash. It was only put to pasture last year. That’s old Apple.
My iPhone 4 seems perfectly fine, I just can’t cope with how slow the iOS updates made it and how bloated websites won’t work on it. It’s just an iPod now. It works well enough for me as such. I’ll continue to use it that way until I cannot. That’s also old Apple.
My iPhone 6s, however, is constantly needing to be charged, and that’s with a NEW battery, replaced under Apple’s free battery replacement program last year. My usage has not changed. It’s actually been reduced, compared to my prior phones, because I also have an iPad that takes some of the usage time. Battery-wise, my 6s is way worse off than prior devices and this is a trend that has been continuing, not reversing. That’s new Apple.
It’s true that most customers don’t think about materials usage. Apple takes that and turns it into a sales opportunity. Most people will see a declining battery as a reason to throw away a difficult-to-service device and buy a new one. Even people like me who do care about the issue find ourselves not enabled to do much about it. That’s a choice that’s been made for us. If you think that’s not something Apple prefers... Not only does Apple sell more new devices, they also now make money reselling the phones that their customers give back to Apple when they buy new ones. It’s not for the environmental or materials usage issue. It’s money that is otherwise left on the table, or lost to someone else. That’s what this supply chain management is all about.
Actually, a lot of your reply sounds like you agree with me... when I’m not talking about Apple in specific. Yes, Apple do stand out from the average American manufacturer. I used to be all in on believing in Apple doing the right thing. I’m all for Apple putting leg behind lip about materials usage. So far, it really is just PR, and their wasteful designs and packaging are the tell. I’m pointing out that they’re not doing all they COULD and SHOULD be doing. If they want me to believe, they need to actually do the work. Right now it is so selective as to be clearly seen for the PR and profit-only motivation that it is. Ethics aren’t about doing something seemingly positive just because it offers more profit. It’s about doing the right thing, regardless.
Believe me, I WANT Apple doing the right thing. That’s WHY I am presenting criticism and calling out where Apple is clearly not doing the best for the issue of materials use. I have actively shared these critiques with Apple, so it’s not like I’m expecting them to hear me here. This commentary is for anyone willing to look beyond their knee-jerk desire to defend Apple.
I could rant about other companies I liked, doing stupid shit with materials usage, like Newman’s Own brand of food products: They donate all their profits to charity, so it really shocked me when they suddenly showed how frelling clueless they are about petroleum usage and started selling their tomato sauce in PLASTIC jars instead of glass (they’re awful plastic jars too, since they’re ribbed; you can’t empty them effectively). It’s offensive to me as a person that gives a shit about us not wasting petroleum on disposable plastic packaging, especially where glass will do (glass is not rare, and it is inert, just in case it ends up dumped somewhere).
Plastic packaging is literally as wasteful as burning this precious and finite resource inside internal combustion engines (especially when incinerator companies are incentivizing local governments they’ve sold their money-losing incinerators to to NOT recycle, and to dump the plastics into the incinerator instead).
The healthcare system, for example, needs these materials far more than a tomato sauce seller... just like healthcare is in competition for the finite helium that people waste in frelling party balloons (MRI machines are vital for diagnostics and they consume helium).
Any company that claims to care about ethical, environmental, pro-social behaviors... especially if they’re going to beat their drum and toot their horn about it... needs to do all they can, and do it earnestly. Otherwise, yeah, I’m going to come criticizing their disingenuous PR. I don’t have children of my own, but I give a damn about the future wellbeing of the people who will live long after me. When our current generations have wasted all the resources... Have you seen the TV series Max Headroom? “20 Minutes Into The Future” is going to be the real world soon enough if we keep letting corporations waste materials like this just to pursue the insane goal of perpetual gains.
it looks to me like Dysamoria is complaining about the original iPhone lasting until last year, a 4S that’s still working and an iPhone 6S that got a cheap replacement battery and also works.
In that length of time most android users would have replaced their devices 5 times or more.
Of course android phones didn’t exist when the original iPhone was released so I’m actually compensating for that; from what I’m able to work out the replacement cycle is 2 years for an android device - in the US - and 4 years for the iPhone. That’s a big carbon saving as the majority of carbon costs are in the manufacture.
Not only that, they are gradually using more and more recycled materials in their products, including recycled plastic, bio-plastic, recycled tin, recycled rare Earth metals, recycled aluminum, so on and so forth, all with increasingly lower emissions to produce the product, and probably lower toxicity too. Yes, they can do better, and they have a goal of closed loop manufacturing after all.
Maybe you don’t think they will get there, but time is definitely needed to improve the processing to recover materials, the processing to recycle materials, to change people’s habits liking turning a dead iPhone in back to Apple. They have been saying there are using recycled this or that material in new products. I definitely think this trend is only going to increase.
Heck, I have a first gen iPhone and the only problem with it is that the power button does not respond. That means I have to wait for the screen to naturally turn off based on my settings. It still works!
Apart from the iPhone XR (opted for the XS Max) and the iPhone 11 (opted for the 11 Pro Max), I have every model of the iPhone and all of them are in working order.
Short-life products is the exact opposite of what you would call these products.
2) If Apple gets to buy and use old devices from other CE makers—how many of them are using aluminum or steal cases?—to use for their devices so they can maintain 100% recycled material, what are others doing for their devices? How does another player move to also achieve the same goal if they can't even use their own devices because Apple is using them all? This means that mining I still going on to keep up with demand, and it's potentially even worse now because Apple will no longer need to be involved with keeping the mines safe and ethical with your scenario. So how exactly is the world a better place?
3) Again, this notion you've asserted that Apple can be 100% closed loop is impossible, even if if's something one should actively strive for, not unlike how we keep working toward perpetual motion for unlimited energy. It's not reasonable to say Apple will invent this, but it is reasonable that we should try to push as close as possible.
A couple of note worthy examples and there are lots of them like this, in 1959 the soda can weight 65gm of AL today it is only 13gm most that is recycled content, prior to this it was made of steel and not recycled. In the last 50 yrs the world has retired 65% of the land needed to feed the world and the population has more than doubled. Farming has become more efficient. This was done by improving crops, but the people who complain about GMO and what locally grown everything which required more resources and land. There are plenty of example like this as well. Be careful what you complain about the solution could be far worse.
Just keep in mind Apple put a computer in everyone's pocket, we are almost to the point where you may not need a desk top computer, think the resources needed to make a desktop computer verse an iPhone or ipad.
https://spectator.us/just-best-decade-human-history-seriously/