I generally operate under the belief that companies avoid outright lying, particularly major ones like Apple. But, they may be stretching the truth, such as by salvaging a neglible amount of material and then chucking the rest. I'm not seeing a clear process on how they could do more than that.

Also, even if Apple is able to extract and reuse the metals or some such, the complete inability to swap out the batteries without destroying the device, combined with reports that battery capacity reaches unusable levels within a couple years, is of great concern.