Apple has announced that it is quadrupling the number of locations its U.S customers can send their iPhones to be disassembled by the company’s recycling robot, Daisy.
Daisy will be in charge of disassembling and recycling select used iPhones that have been returned to Best Buy stores found in the U.S and via KPN retailers in the Netherlands. The customers can also, of course, turn in their devices for recycling at any Apple Store or even through the Apple Trade In program on the official apple website.
“Advanced recycling must become an important part of the electronics supply chain, and Apple is pioneering a new path to help push our industry forward,” Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, has said in a statement “We work hard to design products that our customers can rely on for a long time. When it comes time to recycle them, we hope that the convenience and benefit of our programs will encourage everyone to bring in their old devices.”
According to Apple, the company received almost 1 million devices through the Apple programs in 2018. Daisy is capable of disassembling 1.2 million of them, per year, at the rate of 200 per hour and can now recover even more important materials than before. Once these materials are recovered, they are recycled for the manufacturing process.
In addition to Daisy’s hard work, Apple also announced the opening of a Material Recovery Lab, whose purpose is to discover future recycling processes. The facility will be located in Austin, Texas and will be looking into innovative solutions that involve robotics and machine learning in order “to improve on traditional methods like targeted disassembly, sorting and shredding.”
Back in 2018, Apple refurbished over 7.8 million of its devices and diverted over 48,000 metric tons of electronic waste from landfills.
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