> "Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass," John Yeider, Apple's recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called "Takeback Program Report" in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. "All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials. After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale."
As the article points out recycling should be a last resort (after reuse). Apple is deliberately obstructive of that.
Laptops I can often buy new and resell to recoup a significant part of the original cost...my first few Apple laptops were purchased used. iPods have been repurposed as; low-tier gym music players, sound machines for a baby, full time car music bulk playback.
Due to generally higher build quality, they seem to last longer and being almost a commodity (a relatively small number of SKUs and popular), it's easy to find replacement/new parts many years later.
I did try and repurpose my old Nexus One phone for a RaspberryPi project, but the screen/touchscreen died.
On the day of the iPad Mini announcement last week, my iPad spontaneously threw itself off the bed in a fit of grief and shattered on my concrete floor. Battery is a bit old but the logic board is perfectly okay; Apple is just gonna shred it into confetti.
My disagreement is that for multiple reasons (build quality, longevity, and small number of popular SKUs), which are because of Apple, there is a much larger secondhand market than most tech products or even non-tech products in general. This also means I can more easily find replacement parts by buying things like your broken iPad on ebay/craigslist.
I also think it sucks Apple gets dinged for their Takeback program. I do have a problem with things that make the consumer feel good without actually materially improving anything and with situations where companies pressure cities to build half-hearted recycling programs when companies should accept more of a burden.
I have a young kid and their toys burn through batteries. My wife has battery recycling at work. After giving up nagging her to take them I remembered Best Buy has a prominent display for electronics recycling. After keeping used batteries in my car for a few weeks I finally stopped by one and found it explicitly did not accept alkaline batteries. I can't imagine the hoops needed to acceptably dispose of rechargeable headphones or laptops.
Sure, these programs make some people feel a little better about consuming these things, but after decades of this I haven't seen any of this consumer energy going to anything more productive. Often, it's the city/waste collection taking the burden instead of the company that produced it.
It would do a lot to put my mind at ease if Apple produced a similar video showing how AirPods get torn down, although it's early enough in their history that Apple is probably just throwing expired AirPods in a shipping container to wait until the numbers make sense.
(Apple accepts all their old products back for recycling; I take most of my used electronics to Staples, but Apple stuff always goes back to Apple, as I assume they can do the best job of getting every ounce of meat out of the pig.)