Let’s face it, while Apple and others have improved the durability of their smartphones, they’re not exactly tough. One drop could break your phone. As phones grew and the amount of vulnerable screen space grew, cases became a necessity. Damaging and needing to replace parts of your smartphone is bad enough for the environment, but all of these accessories don’t make things better. Apple’s charging cables famously fray quickly, leaving users with e-waste they can’t easily recycle. Every time you upgrade your iPhone you can recycle the phone itself, but the battery cases, cases, MagSafe wallets, cables, and other accessories are often simply useless.
Apple has a recycling program for their iPhones. And they have to collect lithium ion batteries, as they’re a retailer that sells them. However, that’s far from the only recyclable waste Apple creates. They could easily collect, recycle, and reuse many of the parts in their accessories. Unfortunately, Apple simple doesn’t.
As a tech reviewer who keeps buying this stuff, it’s really starting to bother me.
Plastics, and Magnets, and Silicone, Oh My!
I’m going to have so many useless bands if Apple ever drastically changes the shape of the Apple Watch…
So much of what Apple sells can be recycled. Not 100% of each product, but certainly large quantities of it. For every bit that is recycled, that’s less that has to come out of the ground or end up back in the ground in a form that nature can’t break down. Not only do they fill our landfills and oceans with waste, but the process of pulling these materials out of the ground are often highly unethical. Tin and cobalt mines, necessary for electronics, often make use of unsafe mining conditions and child labor.
But so much of this is reusable. Nimble made cases from recycled CDs and water bottles. Apple could easily do the same. Their cases use a plastic frame that can likely be recycled, and silicone that can be shredded and placed into new silicone products. The leather, admittedly, is harder to reuse, but not impossible. Destroyed cables? They still have perfectly good copper to reuse. The ring of magnets used for MagSafe likely wouldn’t be damaged from within Apple’s products. Reusing them saves the difficulty of mining and production.
Apple’s already collecting some of their products for recycling, from iPhones to MacBooks and everything in between. I’m just suggesting that perhaps they should collect everything with an Apple logo.