Apple Made Millions In Gold By Recycling Old iPhones And iPads Last Year
Apple recovered more than a tonne of gold from recycled iPhones, iPads and Macs last year, claims a new report.
The brand is said to have a made a whopping $40 million (£28 million) in 2015 from the scrapped gold.
While the Cupertino-based brand isn’t actually gold-plating its products, gold is used in a variety of technical components due to its conductivity and resilience to corrosion.
The gold was a small percentage of the reusable materials that Apple was able to salvage but due to its current market value being reasonably high, the gold is worth a fortune.
Apple also managed accumulate 23 million pounds of steel, 13 million pounds of plastic, and 12 million pounds of glass, says Apple’s Environmental Responsibility Report.
A massive 6,600 pounds of silver was also among the salvaged bounty.
Apple’s Renew scheme enables customers to hand in their old devices for cash reductions of their next Apple gadget, which is how the brand had access to all the old handsets.
Apple used lines of factory robots to disassemble the handsets in order to get to the valuable components.
Image credit: Philip Sowels / Future Publishing/REX/Shutterstock
