The iPhone is Apple’s most successful product to date; but there’s a problem. The rising demand for rare earth metals – particularly cobalt, a necessary ingredient for smartphone batteries – has revealed projected shortages in the future, not to mention ethical problems in the supply chain. This has prompted the California-based tech giant to try and safeguard its access to cobalt and other rare earth metals.
Part of the strategy involves buying cobalt direct from mining companies in a bid for supply chain transparency. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), whose cobalt mines make up 60% of the global supply and are known to employ children, undoubtedly looms large in these calculations. Having weathered its own labour scandals, and having witnessed the mistakes of global companies such as Nike and Gap – Apple wants to keep its iPhone production chain on the right side of history. It’s notable that Apple, along with automakers Volvo and BMW, is a member of the Responsible Cobalt Initiative, a Chinese-led initiative to ensure an ethical supply of cobalt.
The other part of Apple’s strategy to access REMs is to recycle them from decommissioned iPhones – in other words, to create a closed production loop. Apple has sold around 2.5 billion iPhones, with an estimated half of those devices still in circulation. That leaves over a billion iPhones to be disassembled for the valuable metals they contain.
The solution is appropriate for Apple – an 18-meter long robot named Daisy, designed to break apart old iPhones and remove the necessary REMs at a rate of 200 phones per hour. One robot in the U.S. city of Austin, Texas extracted metal from over a million iPhones in 2017. Daisy uses, among other things, targeted blasts of freezing cold air to do this work.
But while the technology itself is interesting (Apple has hinted at sharing Daisy with other industries, such as automakers), the question of how it could affect the mining industry is even more notable. The market for recycled metals will increase as the potential supply of recycled metal scales up over time – but can it really make a dent in the demand for newly-mined ore?
The answer, by Apple’s own admission, is no.
Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of Environment Policy and Barack Obama’s former Environmental chief, said: “We’re not necessarily competing with the folks who mine. There’s nothing for miners to fear in this development.”
Apple’s stated intention to eventually decouple itself from the mining industry – and to manufacture all of its products from recycled ore – has been criticised by some as a PR move. Nevertheless, from an environmental perspective, it’s hardly a malfeasant goal. If Apple could become a closed-loop manufacture, it would be a commendable and inspiring development. The technology they (and potentially other companies) develop to achieve this goal, such as Daisy the robot, could make it increasingly possible to recycle ore and easy demand in some segments of the market.
That said, mining companies and their partners don’t need to worry about their businesses being cut out of the picture. Popular estimates put the value of the global EV industry at more than A$1.5 trillion by 2026, with an estimated 125 million electric vehicles on the road by 2030. The global solar energy market, which also relies on a long list of metals, is expected to surpass A$370 billion by 2026.
The scope of this demand requires much more than recycled electronics – it requires the exploration of new REM deposits, and strong initiatives to bring known supplies up to ethical standards. It requires ground-breaking efforts to make our own industrial processes more efficient. Davey Bickford-Enaex (and our mining partners around the world) fully intend to meet that challenge.
