Apple’s latest environmental report, has revealed the company salvaged a literal ton of gold from old iPhones, iPads and Macs in 2015
Yes an actual ton. To be precise, just under 1,000 kilos of the precious metal was handed over when people traded in their old Apple devices, reports Fortune.
That amount of gold has a value well into the millions of dollars and on top of that Apple was able to recover 3,000 kilos of silver.
In fact, last year the company recovered a whopping 27.9 million kilos of material from recycled devices.
Gold is widely used in electronics because it’s an excellent conductor of electricity and doesn’t corrode easily, however it’s incredibly expensive.
According to New York Gold Spot Price a kilo of top quality gold is currently worth around £28,000 – which means Apple is sitting on quite the fortune in recycled gold – although theirs isn’t the top grade stuff.
But before you start smashing apart your iPhone to extract a small fortune in precious metal it’s worth noting that it only contains 0.034 grams – about £1.28 worth according to CNN Money. Damn.
If you were wondering how Apple extracts all this gold – they’ve only gone and invented a robot to do it for them.
And the best part is, it’s called Liam.
Their report says:
Existing recycling techniques, like shredding, only recover a few kinds of materials and often diminish their quality.
So we invented Liam, a line of robots designed to disassemble 1.2 million phones a year, sorting all their high-quality components and reducing the need to mine more resources from the earth.
Cheers Liam.
