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If I take a box of old apple devices and accessories to the Apple Store from any point in the history of the company, they will put them through their own recyc

by krrrh 5y ago

If I take a box of old apple devices and accessories to the Apple Store from any point in the history of the company, they will put them through their own recycling program. A box of old PCs will go to my municipal e-waste program and end up in an incinerator (which is the best case scenario, but we know what happens to e-waste in a lot of jurisdictions). That iPhone torturing robot [0] that they demoed a few years back may have seemed a bit silly, but I don't think any other electronics manufacturer is concerned about finding a const-effective way of separating the screws from other metals before recycling everything. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bu-gl7v-P8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Bu-gl7v-P8

kennywinker 5y ago
The question is what percentage of the material that enters their recycling program actually cycles back into new things, and how much carbon is burnt doing that. I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily discarded computers. If 75% of the materials are recycled (generous, I couldn't find recent numbers but in 2010 they were recycling 28%) that means one landfilled mac for every 4 recycled. If a machine is killed by it's SSD, that's at LEAST a quarter of a mac in the landfill.
- krrrh 5y ago
  The SSD being the thing that takes down a computer seems like a theoretical concern (for most users). They certainly typically have longer lifespans than spinning drives. I wouldn’t be too surprised if my parents’ hermetically sealed fanless MacBook Air is still sipping power a decade from now. And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90% of users would never avail themselves of. They have for sure increased the recycling rate massively since 2010. Lisa Jackson went from head of the EPA to Apple in 2013, and that’s also when they started to really focus on device longevity, and fostering the pass your old phone down to your kids or up to your parents plus trade-in and refurbish models.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-... > After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%. But it hardly matters. If the failure rate is 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 - either way there are a staggering amount of M1 macs that will be trashed every year because of failed SSDs. You are right, the standard on-board connectors are extra material. It'd be a fun engineering challenge to reduce the non-recyclable material cost of standard connectors.

by krrrh 5y ago

kennywinker 5y ago

The question is what percentage of the material that enters their recycling program actually cycles back into new things, and how much carbon is burnt doing that. I'm glad apple is exerting engineering resources to make their products recyclable and out of recycled materials - but I also can't ignore that linking the lifespan of the entire computer to the lifespan of the SSD is going to result in many unnecessarily discarded computers. If 75% of the materials are recycled (generous, I couldn't find recent numbers but in 2010 they were recycling 28%) that means one landfilled mac for every 4 recycled. If a machine is killed by it's SSD, that's at LEAST a quarter of a mac in the landfill.

krrrh 5y ago
The SSD being the thing that takes down a computer seems like a theoretical concern (for most users). They certainly typically have longer lifespans than spinning drives. I wouldn’t be too surprised if my parents’ hermetically sealed fanless MacBook Air is still sipping power a decade from now. And that’s to say nothing of the extra materials that would be required to house a socket for a separate SSD board which 90% of users would never avail themselves of. They have for sure increased the recycling rate massively since 2010. Lisa Jackson went from head of the EPA to Apple in 2013, and that’s also when they started to really focus on device longevity, and fostering the pass your old phone down to your kids or up to your parents plus trade-in and refurbish models.
- kennywinker 5y ago
  https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-... > After taking into account drive age and equalizing it between SSDs and HDDs, we can see that the results have changed significantly. SSDs aren't that far behind hard drives in failure rate, with a 1.05% annualized failure rate compared to 1.38%. But it hardly matters. If the failure rate is 1 in 100 or 1 in 1000 - either way there are a staggering amount of M1 macs that will be trashed every year because of failed SSDs. You are right, the standard on-board connectors are extra material. It'd be a fun engineering challenge to reduce the non-recyclable material cost of standard connectors.