Apple earns how much on those gold from recycle Apple products?

[Svnla]

$40 million USD last year.

In its annual environmental report released this week, Apple said it recovered 2,204 pounds (more than a ton) of gold from recycled iPhones, iPads and Macs last year. That's $40 million worth.

http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/technology/apple-gold-recycling/


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[Imp]

Not bad. Drop in the bucket for them, but I hope this gets other electronics makers to do the same -- I'm under the impression that they did the recycling responsibly and didn't ship it to a Chinese village.

 

[wetech]

I remember seeing an article on Tom's Hardware about extracting the gold from PC parts, mainly motherboards. It was a rather involved process using a lot of chemicals. I forgot how many parts they had to recycle, but it was a lot. The result, a BB sized pellet of gold.

 

[Kaido]

Mashable has a behind-the-scenes look at the Liam recycling robot from Apple:

http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot

 

[PottedMeat]

Mashable has a behind-the-scenes look at the Liam recycling robot from Apple:

http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot

Liam completes an iPhone disassembly process every 11 seconds, with dozens running through the system at all times. About 350 units are turned around each hour, equivalent to 1.2 million iPhones each year. Apple wouldn't say when Liam started its work, but emphasized the project is still in the research and development stages.

neat. automated disassembly is a bit more difficult than assembly - i wonder if an assembly liam would perform better than foxconn's army of people & robots. or at least scare foxconn into a better deal with apple.

 

[Miramonti]

It doesn't address the cost of doing so nor the environmental impact to do so, as related to which chemicals and the amount of them used in the process.

 

[LTC8K6]

They may have recovered $40M at a cost of $50M for all we know.

 

[gorcorps]

neat. automated disassembly is a bit more difficult than assembly - i wonder if an assembly liam would perform better than foxconn's army of people & robots. or at least scare foxconn into a better deal with apple.

Makes me wonder if they've considered ease of disassembly (by machine) as part of modern designs. Now that they know what "Liam" is capable of, maybe they've made the modern phones easier to disassemble with it, and increase recycling rate in the future once the current phones start getting trashed.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I remember seeing an article on Tom's Hardware about extracting the gold from PC parts, mainly motherboards. It was a rather involved process using a lot of chemicals. I forgot how many parts they had to recycle, but it was a lot. The result, a BB sized pellet of gold.

I remember that one too. It was a lot of work for the average person to do.

 

[Schfifty Five]

$40 million USD last year.




http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/technology/apple-gold-recycling/


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I don't think "earn" is the right term here. Like others have pointed out, who knows what the cost of recovery that gold is.

The only thing we do know is that they recovered $40M in gold.

 

[Imp]

neat. automated disassembly is a bit more difficult than assembly - i wonder if an assembly liam would perform better than foxconn's army of people & robots. or at least scare foxconn into a better deal with apple.

I don't know, but I'm going to guess that this is cheaper:

http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1870162,00.html

 

[HeXen]

But how much was spent actually getting that gold back? It says the weight that was recovered but doesn't really mean that was $40 million in their pocket does it? I didn't read the actual article.

 

[luv2liv]

They may have recovered $40M at a cost of $50M for all we know.

exactly!
extracting gold aint easy.