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The latest version of Apple’s iPhone recycling robot now disassembles devices rather than unscrewing them to access the insides.
The change is one of many that has increased the usefulness of Apple’s recycling robots from 12 minutes per phone (which the company acknowledges was actually just a research project) to 18 seconds.
Apple’s early iPhone recycling robots
Apple’s first iPhone recycling robot, Liam 1.0, was first unveiled by the company in 2016.
Liam is an autonomous robot that can strip down your iPhone to its most basic components for recycling. Apple released a short video of Liam taking apart an iPhone. Liam took apart everything from the display to the logic board to the camera components. This allows Apple to separate the gold, copper, silver and platinum materials to use in future products and initiatives.
While the company touted it pretty heavily at the time, it’s fair to say that the first version was more of a proof of concept than a tool that could actually have an impact on the environment. It was too slow to scale.
Liam 2.0 has seen dramatic improvements, reducing disassembly time from 12 minutes to 11 seconds.
Daisy is smaller, better and more flexible
Apple’s current version, Daisy, is actually a little slower at 18 seconds. TechCrunch More important, as we discovered during our facility visit, is its ability to separate nearly twice the amount of material in a much smaller footprint.
Daisy has significantly reduced Liam’s overall footprint from 29 robots to four major modules across 100 feet, while also increasing the number of material output streams from eight to 15.
Apple has also steadily increased the number of iPhone models the robot can handle — Liam 1.0 only supported one model, Liam 2.0 increased that to six, but Daisy’s flexibility has increased from 18 models at the start to 29 now.
From gently unscrewing to tearing
Apple realized they didn’t have to be gentle because they were only looking to reuse raw materials, not parts.
The striking difference between Liam 1.0 and Daisy’s cycle times is partly due to a radical overhaul of the separation process. Whereas the first robot carefully twisted off the various parts, the new version takes a sort of brute force approach; the robot now “punches” the parts out. It’s now much faster to effectively disassemble a phone, and the results are much less pretty, but who cares what a discarded phone looks like? After all, it’s being melted down, not refurbished.
But there is still a long way to go
The article points out that even Daisy’s current capabilities pale in comparison to the scale of the e-waste problem.
At its current pace, Daisy could recycle up to 1.2 million iPhones per year, a big improvement over previous models, but ultimately a tiny fraction of the 150 million smartphones that will be discarded in 2023 (about 416,000 per day), which is just a fraction of the 68 million tonnes of gadgets discarded worldwide.
But Apple sees Daisy as an ambassador as well as an employee. Environmental causes don’t get attention in public, but robots do. If the company can use the media attention to promote other ways to reduce e-waste — like encouraging people to find new uses for their old iPhones rather than leaving them in a drawer — it will probably do more good than Daisy herself.
The full story explaining exactly how Daisy works makes for a fascinating read.
Photo: Apple
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