‘Apple’s plan to produce with only recycled material is unfeasible’

Several experts argue that Apple’s plan to make products with only recycled materials in the future is completely unfeasible for the time being. There is no infrastructure and strategy for recycling the materials and acquiring them through mining would be cheaper.

According to Alex King, the director of the American Critical Materials Institute, Apple’s ambition is a noble pursuit, but it poses a huge challenge for the company. King explains to Motherboard that there is not yet a strategy for recycling rare earths. Current iPhone models use about 60 to 65 different chemical elements, most of which are not yet recycled at all and only come from mines.

In addition, King argues that Apple is not able to make new iPhones purely from recycled materials from old iPhones. As a result, it is unclear where Apple obtains the necessary rare metals through recycling. The vast majority of discarded iPhones and MacBooks don’t end up in Apple’s hands to be dismantled. This means that Apple must also draw on other end-of-life products for its production materials.

Researcher Benjamin Sprecher of Leiden University confirms King’s statement and states that there is not yet an infrastructure for recycling the materials in order to produce enough metals for Apple’s needs. According to him, Apple’s plan will require collecting a large volume of waste electronics and will first need to refine the collected used polluted materials to be made usable again for the production of new electronics. Sprecher says this process is more expensive than mining the necessary metals.

Kyle Wiens of the website iFixit says Apple’s plan today is “100 percent unachievable.” He says he doesn’t see how Apple can achieve the white color of iPhones, for example, by using only recycled material. According to Wiens, with this pursuit, Apple can simply claim to be making progress in this area, without backing it up with evidence or independently verifying it.

Another problem is the fact that Apple itself prevents the recycling of its own products, because the company opposes proposed legislation from some US states that introduces ‘right to repair’. Should this legislation be enacted, Apple and other manufacturers must sell repair parts to consumers and independent repairers and make repair manuals publicly available. Apple has previously successfully lobbied against such legislation in New York.

Gay Gordon-Byrne, director of the Repair.org website and proponent of such a “repair right,” believes that if Apple really cares about the environment, then the company should allow consumers to use their iPhones and MacBooks for much longer. make it function.

Apple announced in its latest environmental report on Wednesday that it plans to only make products with recycled materials in the future. The company has not disclosed when Apple wants to do this. It is still unknown whether Apple has internally set a date from which it will start making products entirely from recycled materials.