Apple hopes that e-waste will become a thing of the past thanks to its Daisy family of specialist break-down robots that will transform old iPhones into raw materials
First there was Liam, marks 1 and 2. Now there is Daisy, or rather double Daisy, Dave, and Taz. These aren't members of a manufactured pop band but rather Apple's evolving team of advanced de-manufacturing robots.
The problem with recovering these materials from a smartphone is that it packs them, in secure and complex ways, in a very small space. An iPhone is more than a powerful computer, chips and circuit boards, it is a camera, music player and more. The camera module alone contains tin, copper, gold and other rare earth materials. There are also lenses and tiny speakers to retrieve and disassemble. Apple needed to find an efficient way to pick iPhones apart.
Robot Dave, meanwhile, tackles the iPhone's 'Taptic Engine' to recover tungsten, copper and gold and its steel enclosure. Taz then separates magnets from plastics in speakers. Humans appear at the end of the chain to manually sort and separate materials.That might seem like a lot of effort but – given the colossal wastefulness of extraction – Daisy and co have an outsize impact. One metric ton of recovered iPhone parts avoids the mining of 2,000 metric tons of metal-rich rock.
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