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Almost Nothing About the ‘Apple Harvests Gold From iPhones’ Story Is True

Elixer

Elixer

Lifer
What, they didn't fact check anything that Apple said? Shocker!

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/apple-does-not-melt-iphones-into-gold

You may have seen a viral headline floating around over the last few days: Apple recycled $40 million worth of gold last year, which was extracted from iPhones. Almost none of what was reported is true.

The story was everywhere, from major mainstream outlets like CNN, Fox News, and Huffington Post to tech-focused and normally very good sites such as MacRumors, Gizmodo, Quartz, and The Verge. I’ve never come across a story that has been so uniformly misreported—hundreds of outlets covered Apple’s “Environmental Responsibility Report,” and not one article I read came remotely close to getting the story right.

The most egregious and inaccurate storyline goes something like this: Apple, out of the goodness of its heart or perhaps fueled by monetary incentives, took old iPhones and iPads that were brought back into its stores, took them apart, melted down the roughly 30 milligrams of gold in each phone, and ended up with 2,204 total pounds of gold.
Click to expand...
 
Maybe someone as a prank, though it would be funny to spread the rumor that you can melt your iPhone to extract gold worth more that the phone itself... 😀
 
for many precious metals, including gold, it is much more economical to recover them from devices than to mine new ore.

aluminum is the most recyclable material on the planet, with recycling taking something like 90% less energy than mining and refining ore. raw material suppliers will buy machining chips and other leftover pieces from their customers.

so apple recycling isn't really surprising - plenty of other people do it. if it weren't monetarily efficient, i doubt they would, though.
 
Fenixgoon said:
for many precious metals, including gold, it is much more economical to recover them from devices than to mine new ore.

aluminum is the most recyclable material on the planet, with recycling taking something like 90% less energy than mining and refining ore. raw material suppliers will buy machining chips and other leftover pieces from their customers.

so apple recycling isn't really surprising - plenty of other people do it. if it weren't monetarily efficient, i doubt they would, though.
Click to expand...
Or better. Aluminum really likes being bound to oxygen in the ore.
It's not nearly as energy-intensive to make metallic aluminum hot enough to melt.

Where I work, we separate it out into extruded aluminum (typically 6000-series, usually with paint on it), sheets (typically 3000-series), and chips.
I think they end up getting a bit more money for it if it's separated out like that by grade, or it could just be to reduce the number of pallet containers that get sent out for recycling.
 
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