Upgrading to an iPhone 12? Apple Inc. is happy to take your old phone out of your hands. “If you are in good shape, we will help you go to a new owner,” the company promises on the website promoting its exchange program. “If not, we will send it to our recycling partner, so we can save more precious materials and get less out of the earth.”
For years, Apple has used that rhetoric to convince consumers that it is a greener and more sustainable company than its competitors. Increasingly, it is fair to ask how sincere he is.
Earlier this year, Apple filed a lawsuit against GEEP Canada, a recycler it had hired to destroy and recycle old devices. Instead of doing contract work, Apple says, GEEP employees determined that many of these devices were still perfectly usable and diverted at least 100,000 for resale. After an investigation, Apple discovered that many of the lost phones were being used in China, presumably still in “good condition.”
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Apple’s anger at GEEP is certainly understandable if those charges are true. But consumers who entrusted Apple to manage their used products in an environmentally friendly way could be forgiven for holding their own grudge. When the details of the case came to light recently, many people in the tech world objected. In this case and others, it’s clear that Apple has repeatedly failed to deliver on its own lofty promises on legacy device management. In doing so, he has diverted consumers from seeking more sustainable and lucrative outlets for their unwanted devices, and undermined his arguments for being a good steward of the environment.
Making a new smartphone is not always a pleasant process. According to Apple, 79% of the carbon emissions associated with the total life of an iPhone 11 are emitted during the production phase. To its credit, Apple has tried to mitigate these damages. Among other things, it now uses recycled tin and rare earth elements, which is a huge improvement over the use of virgin materials. And the company’s trade-in program provides a steady stream of used phones that can be refurbished and resold. In its most recent environmental report, Apple says it restored 11.1 million devices for new users in 2019, noting that each one “represents a smarter and more environmentally efficient use of the resources and materials of the devices. that we depend on to make our products. “
Yet that laudable commitment has long been in tension with the company’s push to sell new devices. Sometimes Apple is candid about this. In 2019, CEO Tim Cook blamed sales of weaker-than-expected new iPhones on discounted battery replacements. But more often, the company takes quiet actions that limit the number of old devices that can compete with newer models. It refuses to provide even basic repair documentation to users, for example, or to sell replacement parts to unlicensed customers and repair shops. He has also lobbied vigorously against laws that might require such concessions.
I’ve covered the recycling industry for more than a decade, and in that time I’ve come across numerous executives who have expressed dismay at Apple’s requirement that at least some perfectly reusable devices be recycled. None of them advocated breaking contracts and diverting those devices to second-hand markets. But I’m not surprised that GEEP employees think about doing it. Seeing treasure where others see trash is a long-used way to recycle profits.
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So how does Apple decide which devices to reuse and which to recycle? When I asked, a company spokesperson said only that it undergoes “rigorous testing.” He also cautioned that devices refurbished with non-Apple parts pose a safety concern. But there is little public evidence to support that claim. In 2018, 176 million used smartphones were shipped around the world, but malfunctioning parts simply don’t account for the leading causes of smartphone-related injuries.
The good news for iPhone 12 updaters is that they don’t have to depend on Apple to make sure their devices have a long lifespan. In the US, hundreds of companies will buy old iPhones for renewal and resale, and they often pay handsomely. Few of these companies make the kind of pervasive sustainability claims that Apple does. But unlike Apple, they don’t have to worry about their used products competing with their new ones.
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