Recycling with Liam

ByMike Moffit

Moving in the right direction: iPhone recycling using Liam, Apple’s ultimate take apart tool.

I was one of the lucky people here at Small Dog Electronics that was able to invest a little time (while doing other work in my office), observing a live blog of the recent Apple event from 1 Infinite Loop in CA. After a few days, Apple posted the entire keynote to their website and I got to watch, among other portions, the details of their commitment to being a green company and their iPhone recycling effort. Their head of green initiatives, Lisa Jackson, went over what happens when an iPhone cannot be repaired and repurposed. They give it to a highly specialized robot named Liam!

Liam is a research and development project conceived a number of years ago as the iPhone 5 (for the prototype robot) and iPhone 6 were being developed, as a means of maintaining the commitment Apple has made to be a fully green and carbon neutral corporation. If you add another device to the consumer marketplace and resulting waste stream, the least you can do is allow a means of taking it back. A prototype of the robot kept the phone being taken apart in one place and applying individual tools to it. Liam is more of an assembly line, with 29 different arms taking various components and saving them aside for later use and/or recycling while the phone husk is whisked to another station. A quick list of potentially harmful materials kept out of landfills include nickel, aluminum, cobalt, copper, lithium, and tungsten. Components such as screws, sim card trays, batteries and cameras can all be repurposed and recycled in some way, not to mention various plastic and glass being recovered. Apple claims a 97 percent success rate for component removal despite some phones coming back with visible corrosion from being dropped in water. It’s an iPhone 6/6S-eating monster!

Apple’s intentions are great, but the sad truth is that the process of recovering phones is still somewhat failing. Returning iPhones to Apple is only a voluntary thing. They are trying to make it worth your while by offering an Apple gift card with value depending on the condition of your device (all models back to iPhone 5 may have value). Their website has a mail in option for credit process as well. It’s called the Apple Renew program. Apple is making iPhones at a furious rate compared with how much time it takes to tear them apart, so actual recycling of the entire iPhone 6/6S line seems an impossible battle. Also, Liam currently only takes apart that one model. It would seem that they are forced to build a whole new warehouse sized building to contain the next version of Liam each time a new model is unveiled. A necessary cycle, but a vicious one considering the rate at which new devices are introduced. Still, you have to start somewhere.

Kudos to Apple for leading the way in showing there is a responsible method for both introducing and recycling their products. By building these goods in carbon neutral facilities and receiving them back and breaking them down, Apple lives up to its declared goal of impacting the environment as little as possible. We all hope other manufacturers are willing to follow Apple in this ever important endeavor.

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