Apple wants to share its Daisy robot tech for recycling iPhones

We have a problem. We are producing electronic waste at an unimaginable rate. Last year, for example, we produced enough e-waste to create a mountain of 2 million Statues of Liberty. So one of the things Apple wants to do is not just solve it with its own devices, but help other people get better at it too. Apple last year announced this Daisy robot, which is a A kind of odd contraption that will take your iPhone and pull it apart, take off the screen, pull out the battery, and really take all those little parts. Gut it and then [UNKNOWN] it's an aluminum shell. So that it can all be recycled. The next step Apple sees is to build the lab around They have this in Austin and the idea is it's going to be called a material recovery lab. They're actually going to encourage people to come in, academics, the recyclers and learn how Daisy works because they think the next step toward actually being able to recycle all of our devices is to have other companies learn how to do it, too. The big thing is that this idea of pulling apart the devices This is not easy. And he recyclers, they're busy enough just keeping up with all of this stuff. So if Apple was able to help them automate, and actually take the technology they've created with Daisy and somehow retrofit some of the stuff they've learned onto existing machinery, the stuff that shreds and pounds and tries to get it all of this stuff. Maybe they think they might be able to help actually get some of these materials back a little better and make recycling work better, which at the end of the day might actually give us a better use of all these materials. One of the other things that Apple talked about with me was how many iPhones Daisy has pulled apart. These are numbers. They haven't announced before. They said that they have successfully move through about 1.2 million iPhones, they said okay we can't refurbish them, let's pull them apart ,get the original materials and see if we can recycle them. The technology that Daisy uses is somewhat proprietary, the designs of how the robot works or Apples designed it uses artificial intelligence technology to identify iPhone they can actually. Pull apart 15 different iphones and knows which one is just by looking at it. All those things are things that Apple thinks that might be able to teach other recyclists to do. It's an interesting idea. Of course Apple only makes a few products compared to the rest of the world where there are Thousands upon thousands of different technology. So it's going to be interesting to see whether Apple can really retrofit its ideas onto the much broader electronics industry. But they think that, at the very least, they can help.