Apple

Appointed by President Barack Obama, Lisa Jackson focused on reducing greenhouse gases, protecting air, and water quality. She was dedicated to prevent exposure to toxic contamination and expand outreach to communities on environmental issues. As the environment, policy, and social initiatives, she also minimizes Apple's impact on the environment by addressing climate change through renewable energy and energy efficiency, using greener materials and invent new ways to conserve precious resources. 

Link: https://www.apple.com/tw/leadership/lisa-jackson/

Apple's Roadmap Using Recyclable Products

In 2020, Apple made a commitment to be 100 percent carbon-neutral for its supply chain and products by 2030. Critical to this effort is a low-carbon product design, which is composed of recycled materials. Apple typically exceeds the industry benchmark of collecting and recycling 70% of the devices produced. By using recycled materials, it helps Apple to avoid an abundance of counterfeit products flooding secondary markets and reduce overall environmental impact. 

When it comes to electronic waste recycling, its supply chain includes three steps: collection, pre-processing, and end-processing.

While Apple works to fulfill these steps in various ways, there are two key ways that recycling plays a role in Apple's sustainability roadmap—sourcing and internal recycling processes.

Apple's Recycling Robot

Daisy robot use a four-step process to remove iPhone batteries and pop out screws and modules and can disassemble 200 iPhones per hour. Later, Dave replaced Daisy for becoming Apple's latest innovative recycling robot. It can effectively dissembles and recovers key materials from an iPhone's Taptic Engine. Aside from rare earth magnets and tungsten, Dave robots are also able to recover steel. 

Recycling Process

The iPhone recycling process begins with customers utilizing the Apple Recycling Program to send their iPhones to Apple. Afterward, the memory is wiped, and the phones undergo dissaembly. Subsequently, components of iPhones including gold, copper, and lithium that can be recycled for new smartphones are crushed into shreds for reporcessing, extracting, and sorting. Finally, the raw materials are prepared for reuse.