Apple robot Daisy recycles old iPhones
The robot Daisy takes apart old iPhones at breakneck speed. Is this the solution to the scarcity of rare metals?
Recycling iPhones
iPhones last a long time and that is of course also allowed for the price. What happens to iPhones when they end up being thrown away? The answer: then they are torn apart into useful parts. Meet the robot Daisy, whose sole job is to convert more than 200 iPhones per hour into useful materials that can later be used in new mobile phones.
For example, did you know that a mobile phone contains 30 mg of gold, 340 mg of silver, 15 mg of palladium and even 1 milligram of platinum? With today’s precious metal prices, that amounts to around €3. And we haven’t even mentioned the lithium from the battery, cobalt and the so-called rare earth metals. In short, literally a gold mine.
Robot Daisy
It is only annoying that it is a very delicate job to remove all these valuable materials from the phone. This is typical work for which a robot is better suited than humans. No wonder that the Californian smartphone manufacturer has opted for a robot to do this job. Apple also chose a robot because the methods used to do this, such as shredding the phones into pieces, could only recycle a small number of materials. The robot Daisy is able to tell apart nine generations of iPhones and knows exactly where which components are located for each model.
Apple leads by example
The yield of materials is indeed impressive. 100,000 iPhones, this is about what the rob processes in a small month, deliver on balance almost 2 tons of aluminum, 770 kg of scarce cobalt, 93 kg of tungsten, 42 kg of tin, 11 kg of rare earths, seven and a half kilos of silver, almost 2 kilos of tantalum, almost a kilo of gold and an ounce of palladium. Apple mainly uses these materials in new phones and laptops. The more of these rare metals we recycle, the less destructive mining is needed. Hopefully there will also be robots to process the many billions of old Android phones. This also contains the necessary valuable minerals. As a market leader, Apple has certainly set a good example.
