Apple Inc on Monday unveiled a robotic system called Liam to take apart junked iPhones and recover valuable materials that can be recycled, such as silver and tungsten. The move is an attempt to address criticism that Apple’s products, while sleek and seamless in design, are so tightly constructed that their components can be difficult to disassemble, refurbish and reuse. Liam, which has been under development for nearly three years, will initially focus on the iPhone 6. Apple plans to modify and expand the system to handle different devices and recover more resources, the company said. The system started to operate at full capacity last month and can take apart one iPhone 6 every 11 seconds to recover aluminum, copper, tin, tungsten, cobalt, gold and silver parts, according to Apple.
At that rate and working uninterrupted, Liam likely can handle no more than a few million phones per year, a small fraction of the more than 231 million phones Apple sold in 2015. Greenpeace welcomed Apple’s initiative as an example of how the company is committed to keeping more products out of landfills, but the environmental group questioned how much of an impact the Liam robot would actually have on overall iPhone recycling volumes. Independent e-waste recyclers, which handle the bulk of discarded iPhones, will not have access to Liam. If it’s easy for a robot, that’s great, said Gary Cook, senior IT analyst for Greenpeace. But making it easier for a human, who will be doing most of this, is part of the solution.
Greenpeace urged Apple to build more products using recycled metals, and to make its devices easier to deconstruct. Cook said Apple has been an industry leader on some environmental issues, such as asking suppliers to run on renewable energy.
