They talk about harvesting the raw metals and elements in the video... The hard part in ewaste recycling isn't collecting the devices, it's breaking them down into their isolated components. The robot's aim is to do that instead of a shredder so that they can have a much higher re-use rate.

http://mashable.com/2016/03/21/apple-liam-recycling-robot/

And of course this is also a project to have a robot do the reverse--assemble iPhones.