That sounds about as serious as this article from Vice. It's just click-bait.

The worst thing they found (as far as I can see) is that the government required Apple to have a recycling program. What a horrible thing the first article was hiding from us.

The point is, that every manufacturer in the USA has a recycling program, as required by law. Why does Apple's press release get published as news?

Because one way of making new things is to take two existing things and combining them into some new arrangement. It's pretty much humanity in a nutshell. So they took "the us govt requires companies of a certain size to set up recycling programs", combine it with "Apple sells a lot of stuff", and bingo, you've got "apple recycles a ton of stuff" as a new story. It's kinda lazy, but it's low hanging fruit.

So, can we expect "Dell recycles a lot of stuff" next week, and HP the week after, followed by Sony?

Dell have an equivalent page: http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/id/corp-comm/us-goodwill-rec...

That's a fair point, but it's not a lie like the article asserts.

Are you being facetious or was this a real story? I'm not in America and have not heard of it.

It's real, and it's not in the Opinion section. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/18/be... (Paywall)

I didn't believed you until I read the article.

"$137 million divided by 4.7 million is ... $29.14.

More than 4.7 million contributions means, at most, 4,749,999 -- or else the campaign would round up to 4.8 million. Even with that higher number of donations, the average is $28.95. Which is more than $27."

This is laughable...but I haven't yet decided if it's in a good or a bad way. I mean, really? they are complaining about a 1-2 dollar difference from what BS says?

It wasn't behind a paywall for me at least. The article has a sensationalist headline but the content is what you would expect for a discussion about averages and pseudo-random quasi-uniform distributions : the average moves slightly. Big deal!