In a locked factory with 24-hour security in an undisclosed area of Hong Kong, iPhones are carefully and meticulously destroyed.
This facility is one of the few in the world that has been selected by Apple Inc. to shred and recycle these important phones. As strict and studied as the specifications for manufacturing the phones in their manufacturing plants are, they are just as strict for their disassembly and weighing so that nothing is lost.
Apple has sold more than 570 million devices since that January morning nine years ago when Steve Jobs took to the stage in San Francisco to reinvent the mobile phone. Even Apple itself doesn’t know how many of those devices are out there, in the hands of their second, third or fourth owners or just sitting in a drawer, forgotten. But the company wants to make sure that as few as possible end up in landfills.
This is the work of the facility in the industrial park in Hong Kong’s Yuen Long district, owned by Apple contractor Li Tong Group. It is where iPhones, iPads and iMacs are sent for disposal.
While large global organizations such as HP, Huawei, Amazon, and Microsoft also have detailed protocols for recycling their products, Apple is the most organized and strict when it comes to the people involved in the process and prevents them from reporting details of it.
“I think people expect it from us, I think our customers are pushing us to hold ourselves to a high standard,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s head of environmental affairs, said by phone from the company’s headquarters in Cupertino. “It’s difficult because these are very complex products.”
Neither Apple nor Li Tong will allow entry to the Hong Kong facilities, say how many phones are recycled, or provide any details about the disassembly process.
In the electronics recycling industry, the goal is to try to recycle 70% by weight of devices manufactured more than seven years ago. Jackson says Apple exceeds that limit and typically reaches 85%, including some non-Apple devices that consumers have returned to Apple stores.
That means it will have to destroy more than 9 million of the 2009 iPhone 3GS phones that were released worldwide. With sales of the phone climbing to 155 million units last year, shredding Apple products is a booming industry.
Li Tong, which also sources equipment from other manufacturers, has three vertical plants in Hong Kong and 12 worldwide. They expect their global productivity to exceed 20%, including their new facility in San Francisco.
Apple said it collected over 40,000 tons of electronic waste in 2014 from recycled devices, which contained enough iron to build a 100-mile railway line.
Brightstar Corp., a company based in Miami, Florida, TES-AMM in Singapore, Li Tong and Foxconn Technology Group in Hong Kong, well-known manufacturers of iPhones, are part of a global network of recyclers who have agreed to more than 50 rules regarding the safety, protection and destruction control of mobile phones.
The process begins in hundreds of Apple stores around the world or online where the company offers gifts to iPhone owners to entice them to return their devices.
After a quick check, the recycler decides to either buy the phone or offer it for recycling without payment. In the US, purchases for functional phones start from $100 for the smallest devices (iPhone 4) up to $350 for the iPhone 6 Plus.
Apple pays for the service and owns every gram of the used phone from the beginning of the creation of the mountain of dust you create to the end, says Linda Li, chief strategy officer at Li Tong. The journey consists of 10 steps where they are checked, measured and separated through airtight chambers that are designed to recover 100% of the chemicals and gases during the process, she added.
Recovered iPhones cannot be transported to other locations, must have their warehouses cleaned and their logos removed. Their scrap cannot be mixed with other companies’ scrap, so recyclers must have facilities that exclusively serve Apple, Li said. Apple is videotaping the entire process at the factory, which employs 300 workers.
While some companies use salvaged components (e.g. chips) to repair broken phones, Apple has followed a strategy of complete destruction.
“The shredded components consume more energy than they return,” says Li. Li Tong works with clients to advise them on how to design products that are easy to disassemble, such as taking smartphone cameras for reuse in drones or repurposing Microsoft tablet screens used in New York City taxis.
Apple shreds its devices to prevent counterfeit products from appearing on secondary markets, Jackson said. The company aims to reuse these damaged components in the future, she added, without giving further details.
“There is a problem in the field of WEEE recycling,” he said. “If we truly want to leave a better world than we found it, we need to invest in methods beyond those that are currently prevalent.”
But what happens to your old iPhone once it’s shredded? Hazardous waste is stored in licensed facilities, and recycling partners can get a share of other materials recovered, such as gold and copper. The rest is cast and shaped into aluminum and furniture profiles or tiles.
SOURCE: www.bloomberg.com
