That’s why we’re discouraged when we take apart the latest iPhones and find the batteries covered in glue. (The 5c’s 1,510 mAh battery is just a hair thinner than the 5s’ 1,560 mAh battery.) It took some heating and prying to get the batteries into both phones; It is not the most desirable operation to perform on something that releases harmful fumes if pierced.
Which means these devices are designed with death clocks attached to them. A company that openly claims that its latest products are environmentally friendly should not stand in the way of such routine maintenance.
One word: plastics: when it comes to recyclability
Apple prides itself on its recycling program, estimating a global recycling rate of 70 percent. But that percentage assumes a useful life of the product of seven years. To understand how false this is (it may be technically true, but not in practice), just think about this: How many people do you know who still use the original iPhone? And that was released just over six years ago; It hasn’t even been seven years yet.
Still, Apple iPhones have at least always been made from recyclable materials, given their now iconic glass and aluminum design. However, the latest iPhone 5c, with its clay-inspired palette, could make recycling more difficult.
Because? Because it introduces 14 grams of difficult-to-recycle polycarbonate into the mix, where the iPhone 5 had none. Every port, button, and slider has had its metal replaced with plastic.
[#contributor: /contributors/592667d4f3e2356fd8009245]|||Kyle Wiens is the co-founder and CEO of iFixit, an online repair community and parts retailer internationally recognized for its open source repair manuals and product teardowns. Launched from his Cal Poly college dorm in 2003, iFixit has now enabled more than 15 million people to fix their broken stuff.|||
The polycarbonate material requires chemical recycling to break down the plastic so it can be reused. The polycarbonate shell of the iPhone is reinforced with a layer of lacquer, which increases the longevity of the case. But this also complicates an already complex recycling process: to make new phones with this plastic, the coating would have to be ground, burned, or otherwise disposed of. This is a far cry from the high-performance process of simply melting waste aluminum.
If you think this plastic will end up in another phone, think again. If we’re lucky, it’ll end up on a park bench.
And while the iPhone 5s is still made from Apple’s regular range of aluminum, it’s important to remember that recycling it’s not the panacea that the company wants it to be. It does not undo the destruction-manufacturing of 700 million iOS devices.
Apple (and other companies) can’t recycle an old phone into a new one, much less recover the critical, and possibly most harmful, rare earth element materials that are lost during recycling. Processing one ton of rare earth metals generates a staggering 75 cubic meters of acidic waste and one ton of radioactive waste.
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After all, all of these activities (whether it’s a user buying a phone or a company promoting its environmental friendliness) occur in a broader cultural context than the purely technical one. I may like the technical act of tearing down devices, but I never forget the social reality that every iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c comes with baggage that consumers never see: mining, material extraction, resource-intensive manufacturing. Processes that leave a mark on almost every continent in the world, not just in a Foxconn assembly factory in China.
As we learned with diamonds, the materials can be ethically dubious. But it’s not just about rare earths. Last month, a Bloomberg report speculated that some of the tungsten used in Apple products could be funding FARC rebels in Colombia. And Apple recently launched an investigation to determine whether tin from the dangerous Bangka mines is used in its new iPhones.
Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90
