- Apple has increased the amount of recycled cobalt used in its products to 25% from the previous figure of 13% last year.
- The company also announced its plans to use 100% recycled tin soldering and gold in all the printed circuit boards that it designed.
In a bid to decrease its carbon footprint, Apple announced that it intended to use 100% recycled cobalt in all Apple-designed batteries, by 2025.
In a statement, the company informed that a quarter of all cobalt found in Apple products came from recycled material, up from 13% the previous year. The company said that it had expanded the use of 100% certified recycled cobalt over the past three years, making it possible to include the same in all Apple-designed batteries by 2025.
“Our ambition to one day use 100% recycled and renewable materials in our products works hand in hand with Apple 2030: our goal to achieve carbon neutral products by 2030,” said vice president Lisa Jackson. “We’re working toward both goals with urgency and advancing innovation across our entire industry in the process.”
Apple’s latest announcement comes very close to Earth Day which is on April 22. A year ago, around the same time, Apple announced that it was doubling its use of recycled materials in products and pushing to eliminate plastics in packaging by 2025.
The company also announced its plans to use 100% recycled tin soldering and gold in all the printed circuit boards that it designed.
Apple’s Daisy
Segregating reusable components from iPhones can be tricky, but Apple’s industrial robot ‘Daisy’, unveiled in 2018, can disassemble nine different versions of the iPhone, sorting all of their reusable components in the process. Daisy has been known to take apart 200 iPhones in a given hour.
Apple estimated that more than 11,000 kg of cobalt have been recovered from batteries extracted by Daisy and then returned to the secondary market, since 2019. Daisy also helps recover rare earth elements, which are largely lost through traditional electronics recycling processes.
