
Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones last year - empressplay
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/15/technology/apple-gold-recycling/index.html
======
ChuckMcM
Thanks, in part, to LIAM[1]

Something that we just started seeing in robotics at the beginning of 2015,
dedicated disassembly robots. They should be able to replace much of the
disassembly done in places like China or Ghana where containers of old
electronics have been dumped. In terms of a project that helps the world I
would totally invest in such robots.

[1] (Warning its Mashable) [http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-
recycling-robot/#f...](http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-
robot/#f8vMQz9f4qqR)

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monochromatic
> Copper is super-cheap, but it moves electrons too slowly for some of the
> most important computing tasks.

Just garbage reporting.

~~~
yuubi
For those who haven't had a physics class, that's garbage because silver is
somewhat more conductive than copper, which is slightly more conductive than
gold.

The main benefit of gold is that it's more stable than copper, so it's a good
material for connector contact surfaces, but the bulk of the contact should be
something else like copper or steel, depending on the relative importance of
electrical or mechanical properties.

~~~
kyllo
By more stable you mean it doesn't oxidize right?

~~~
CapitalistCartr
Yeah, gold is the best for contacts because, as you surmised, it stays clean
of oxidation.

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Pada
Or 1000 kilograms for the rest of the world.

~~~
chrisseaton
Or simply, one tonne. In fact I'd guess that the engineers, thinking in SI
units, told the PR people that 'we recovered a tonne', rounding to that figure
for them because it sounds neat. Then the PR people converted to pounds for
older readers, which comes out as the very precise sounding 2,204. So the
figure is probably rounded but then presented as being much more precise than
it is.

~~~
CydeWeys
I don't understand this whole "tonne" thing. Why overload a word that already
has two other conflicting meanings (the imperial short ton and the imperial
long ton) when you already have a word that is more canonical and completely
unambiguous in "Megagram"? Plus it just sounds cool.

~~~
jdietrich
It's only a problem in the US. The Commonwealth ton is only 1.6% larger than
the tonne, so the distinction is usually insignificant. Most of the world has
no knowledge of either the short or long ton.

Likewise, confusion between "mills" (millimetres) and "mils" (thousandths of
an inch) are an exclusively American problem.

The American adherence to customary units is a constant annoyance for
electronics engineers - an 0603 resistor could measure 0.6mm x 0.3mm or ~1.5mm
x ~0.76mm

~~~
tonyarkles
Sadly also a Canadian problem. We're nominally a metric country, but we're
very much a hybrid. When we went to metric, many things still stayed in
customary units, but with metric names. I'll likely never ask someone to go
get me 454g of sugar from the grocery store, it'll be a pound. Your 2x4 is
going to be 8 feet long. You're going to use 1/2" bolts. My generation does
consistently use litres and celsius though!

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yincrash
2204 / 90,000,000 (total e-waste) = 0.002%

Also, the gold was not just from iPhones. Macs and iPads are included in that
number. What a weird non-story. It would be interesting to know the cost of
the recycling program to know if the materials recovered paid for the program.

~~~
gtirloni
61 out 90 million pounds of e-waste were recyclable materials. I think that's
a more interesting number.

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baskind
Would be equally interesting to know how much it cost them to recover that
much gold from that many devices.

~~~
sfall
it is a profitable venture there are companies that recover precious metals
from computer equipment

~~~
noobie
Hobbyists too.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuwO8AjM7k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuwO8AjM7k)

~~~
awqrre
but at the scale he is doing it, he looses money

~~~
tamana
That's what a "hobby" is: a money-losing activity.

A "business" is a money-making hobby.

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titzer
That's about $40 million to save you a Google search.

~~~
Esau
But how much did it cost them to recover that $40 million is gold?

~~~
jonnathanson
As efficient and economically scaled as Apple's supply chain operations are,
I'm guessing significantly less than $40 million.

~~~
elwell
Also, it's not as if gold is the only benefit produce from their recycling
process.

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plorg
Notably, to me, they have recovered 4x as much steel as aluminum, suggesting
to me that a significant part of their recycling operation is on non-Apple PCs
and or quite old Apple equipment since the bulk of their current products (for
in some cases 10 years) are composed of aluminum.

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mchahn
I knew of an assembly worker at HP Labs whose job including trimming off gold
flash. It was a small amount but she threw it in her desk drawer. After a few
years she sold the collection for a lot of money. She was caught and had to
pay it back.

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sanoli
I remember back when i did film photography, some people used to recover the
silver from the solutions used to print onto paper (you know, from a
negative).

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powertower
This is what 1 tonne (2204 LBS) of gold looks like -
[http://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/gold/images/demon...](http://demonocracy.info/infographics/world/gold/images/demonocracy-
gold-1_ton.jpg)

~~~
neilk
Yeah, I did some calculating and surprisingly, 1 tonne of gold is somewhat
smaller than a 2' cube.

[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+tonne+of+gold+in+cub...](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1+tonne+of+gold+in+cubic+inches)

~~~
tamana
Close to 1.3ft per side, or a 18" diameter sphere

A gallon of gold is 75lbs, almost 10x as dense as water, and worth about
$3million

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Fundlab
What parts of Apple's devices contain gold?

~~~
gallerytungsten
Gold is found on printed circuit boards and components, typically used to
electroplate connectors, so that they won't fail due to corrosion.

~~~
DonHopkins
I wish they made those tiny little round white stickers they have inside Apple
products out of gold [1]. They keep getting wet and voiding my warranty.

[1] [http://www.ebay.com/itm/10x-Water-Damage-Warranty-Sensor-
Ind...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/10x-Water-Damage-Warranty-Sensor-Indicator-
Sticker-for-Apple-
iPhone-3G-3GS-4-4G-/151115840004?hash=item232f34ba04:g:cHMAAOxydlFS8XuQ)

~~~
madeofpalk
I'm not sure if sarcasm or not, but that's the point. If they got wet enough
to 'trip', then enlighten damage could have been done to internal components
to void your warranty anyway.

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db48x
It's funny how these recycling stories always talk about gold, but the real
money is in the chips.

------
em3rgent0rdr
Title should include iPads and iMacs.

------
revelation
Step 1: design iPhones to be not repairable.

Step 2: determine it costs too much to repair "broken" iPhones (see step 1).

Step 3: Burn the whole lot down for precious metals.

What an enormous win for the environment and recycling! There are plenty of
companies that will already do step 3, but pretty much nobody other than Apple
has the opportunity to do something about the vastly more important step 2.

~~~
ericabiz
iPhones are VERY repairable. Source: I run a repair shop and iPhones are most
of our business.

You want to talk about phones that are not repairable? Let's talk about ANY
HTC phone. They're total crap to repair.

The worst, though, are the cheap MetroPCS and Cricket Android phones--the ones
you've probably never heard of but that we get calls about every day, like HTC
Desires, Samsung Galaxy Core Primes, and a whole line of tiny LG phones with
odd model numbers. THOSE phones are completely unrepairable--not because we
can't get the parts, but because the repair, which runs $80 or so to fix a
broken screen, is almost twice what it costs to just buy a new phone.

These phones are unabashedly sold to poor and even to homeless people, who
then get the choice of desperately trying to continue using them when they
inevitably break, or ponying up another $50 to buy a new one. It's a way, way
worse model than iPhones, and one the HN community probably isn't familiar
with (I didn't know anything about this until I started running a repair
store.) It's a pretty disgusting market.

~~~
abrowne
I agree, even as a major iOS detractor, that recent iPhones are amazingly
repairable, while there's an opposite trend for many (most?) high-end Android
phones these days.

But is it really "disgusting" that a phone is cheaper to replace than repair
because it is extremely cheap to begin with? Following that argument, they
would solve the problem by raising the price of the new phone.

~~~
ericabiz
You have to put yourself in the shoes of the poor or homeless person who walks
through the door of our repair shop. They don't have enough money to buy a
computer. So their entire life is on that phone: photos, contacts, documents,
email. They've applied to jobs through that phone. Everything is centered
around that item.

Then it breaks. And since the software is usually so crappy on it, there's no
consistent way for them to have backed it up. Sometimes the contacts are on
the SIM card--sometimes not. Sometimes they've backed up to the Google cloud;
sometimes they didn't understand what that was, so they just hit "skip" when
it asked them to set up that account.

So when that phone breaks, they've lost EVERYTHING. Now I know there are some
folks on HN, because I've been around here long enough, who would say "They
should just learn how to back it up!" And to that I would say, who is teaching
them? Can you? These people are sometimes barely literate, often only with a
high school education (or less.) We can't expect them to understand what a
"Google cloud" is. And heck, even as technical people, many of us don't back
up stuff properly, especially personal items.

So when that phone breaks, they've lost a lot. Personal photos of their kids.
Important contacts. The calendar that reminded them where that job interview
next week was.

Many of these same folks would be far better served buying a used iPhone 4S,
which is $55 to fix when a screen breaks. But the difference between $50 for a
Cricket HTC Desire and a $100 iPhone 4 could be a week or two--a week or two
during which they cannot survive without their phone. That's why I say it's a
disgusting market.

~~~
RyJones
I worked at a now deceased photo-sharing startup, and the stats were so bad.
Most photos never left the device, meaning people had all of these important
life moments in only one place. Lose or break your iPhone? All of baby's first
whatevers, gone forever. Pictures of your mom's last weeks? Gone to the ether.

The part where I will disagree with you slightly is this wasn't just a problem
of the barely literate, or even technical people overlooking backups. When we
did user studies it was essentially everyone that came in - none of them had
off-device backups, or knew how to share. The number of people for which
"sharing photos" meant holding up the phone with a picture on the screen while
the other person took a picture of the phone was depressing. The sharing UI
was totally opaque to them. I see this on Instagram today, where people take
pictures of the display on a DSLR in order to share the photos.

I apologize for the rant. I acknowledge this is a religious hobby-horse for
me. At the aforementioned startup one of the stats that killed me was the
average views of a picture once taken was essentially 0 - pictures go to SD
cards to die. No better for phones. At the time Facebook was getting three or
four Flickrs a week, and the stats were still pretty grim. We have to better
serve customers, but I don't know what that looks like. Verizon offers a
cloud-like service for contacts and photos (I have this on my Samsung U365
flip phone), but it's a pain to set up and unclear when it will cost you
extra.

Bonus story: smart guy I worked with bought a really nice new camera, they
default picture size was too big (too many pixels, too large files) to attach
to emails, so he did the obvious thing: set the default resolution of the
camera to something low enough to fit. WHY OH WHY BUY A 5 MEGAPIXEL CAMERA
THEN SET THE DEFAULT RESOLUTION TO VGA? Because resizing everything was a
PITA. Another unhappy customer experience. We (the industry) need to enable
our customers, not frustrate them.

~~~
tamana
A good camera has a good lens for capturing light and color. Megapixels rarely
matter. A bad lens makes bad pixels all the way up to VGA pixel size.

