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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the bad-reporting dept.

Motherboard at Vice Media reports [vice.com]

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 [...] uniformly misreported.

[...]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.

In this version of the story, Apple pocketed a cool $40 million for its efforts, and lots of this recycling was done by Liam, its just-revealed recycling robot which is capable of disassembling 1.2 million iPhones per year. Simple math shows that Apple would have had to have collected 33.3 million iPhones to recover that much gold. In other words, in this alternate reality, rather than refurbish and resell these iPhones for hundreds of dollars a piece in developing nations, Apple decided to destroy them to harvest roughly $1 worth of gold per device.

[...]Here is the truth: Apple paid independent recyclers to recycle old electronics--which were almost never Apple products, by the way--because it's required by law to do so. Far from banking $40 million on the prospect, Apple likely ended up taking an overall monetary loss. This is not because Apple is a bad actor or is hiding anything, it's simply how the industry works.

All electronics manufacturers that sell products in the United States are required to do e-waste recycling under laws enacted in 25 states [ecycleclearinghouse.org]. The laws are different in each state, but none of them require Apple to recycle Apple products. Instead, they usually require manufacturers to recycle a certain amount of pounds of e-waste, which is linked to either their market share or to the overall weight of products they sell. That's why you see Apple noting that it recycled "71 percent of the total weight of products we sold seven years earlier".

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