Published in El Pais, April 23th 2019.
Everyone knows that the growing amount of e-waste is becoming a problem as the demand for the computers, smartphones and tablets continue to grow. When your old electronics get thrown into a landfill the chemicals often get into the soil causing huge environmental damage. This problem is accelerated by the frequency we often replace these products as some buy a new smartphone every year.
Personally, we could do more such as holding onto our devices a little longer and when we do finally dispose of them we need to take them to a place that will recycle them properly but even that causes problems. Traditional recycling often involves shredding the devices and sorting the valuable minerals from the parts deemed useless. This often results in the parts extracted are of poor quality and a good percentage of the device getting thrown out anyways. It is not all doom and gloom however as Apple is trying out a new way to recycle their old phones in a more effective manner, and for once they are not keeping this secret to themselves.
In a lab near Austin Texas Apple has a robot named Daisey who can disassemble 200 iPhones an hour while keeping its parts in tact. This makes it much easier to extract the valuable materials that maintain a much higher quality to be used later. Things still get thrown out, but much more is recovered. What is also nice is that Apple has invited various academics around to see how their recycling centre works.
Now this could all be a publicity stunt as the company has been accused many times for shortening the life of their devices which would increase the amount of e-waste. Apple also plans on patenting Daisy which is a little counter productive to their decision to invite everyone to see how Daisy works. However, if they are more open to sharing this technology with other companies in good faith we can see the amount of e-waste reducing even as our demand for products grow.
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