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Apple's Strange Decision To Go To Entirely Recycled, No Primary Mining, Metals

This article is more than 6 years old.

Apple has announced that it is going to try to move--try, because they've not worked out how to do this yet--to using no mined metals at all. Nothing which makes up an iPhone or the like will come from new mining, all metallic components and additives will come from recycled production. I can see the public relations value of this as there are all too many people who, entirely wrongly, think that we're on the verge of running out of useful deposits of metals out there. But as an actual real world target it's very strange indeed, verging upon nonsense in fact. The truth being that even attempting to get to that point is going to require the use of more resources, not fewer.

Obviously, is if this is what Apple wants to do then it's their money and they can do as they wish. But it is based upon a fundamental economic misunderstanding. And yes, I did in fact write the book on this. We have no meaningful shortage of any metal nor mineral that is going to affect us in any timescale that we should be worrying about. Some amount of recycling is just fine, most sensible in fact, but expending resources to make closed loop systems is just not worth it.

But that is what they say they want to do:

In its newly released 2017 Environmental Responsibility Report, the Cupertino company--Apple--says its goal is to "stop mining the earth altogether" for rare minerals and metals used to make its devices.

If we were about to run out of stuff then sure, why not? But as I say, I really did write the book on this point. It's here, for free, the No Breakfast Fallacy.

It attempts to discuss one thing and one thing only. Are we likely to
run out of any of the minerals or metals that we like to use in anything
of a timescale that should be of concern to us today? To avoid excessive
narrative tension we shall reveal the answer now: no.
It’s true that there are many people who insist that we are just about
to run out of everything that makes industrial civilisation possible.

But as this book walks through their arguments we find that they’ve
simply misunderstood the numbers that they use to discuss matters.
Those misunderstandings coming in different grades of silliness, of
course. In one chapter we look at some claims made in New Scientist
and find that they have entirely and completely misunderstood what
a mineral reserve is or means. They note that there are no mineral
reserves of several metals and conclude that we’re about to run out
of them. Everyone in the metals industry points out that there are no
reserves of these metals because of the definition of what a reserve
is. That there are no reserves does not mean the end of availability: of
the specific three that New Scientist worries about there never have
been reserves, cannot be reserves, and yet we’ve been using the metals
for decades and will be able to for millennia to come.

Do note that I am not against recycling itself. Apart from anything else I've made far too much money by doing so to make that error:

The first is that if you can make a profit by recycling something then
you should be recycling it. For the profit is the very proof that you are
adding value: that profit is the value by which your output is higher
than the value of your inputs. Given that value added is, by definition,
what everyone collectively can consume then recycling something
to make a profit makes the human race richer. We like that. So,
for example, when I take some offcuts of Russian nuclear alloys (the
bits off the ends of the tubes they stick the uranium into for a reactor)
and ship them off to be made into MAG alloy wheels for boy racers,
and make a profit by doing so as I have done, this adds to the general
wealth of the human race. Because value has been added: the activity
was profitable.

There are also though things we should not recycle:

There’s also recycling that doesn’t add value. This almost certainly
should not be done. Because those losses are, as the inverse of profits,
the sign that value is being destroyed by doing the recycling. For
example, it’s entirely possible to take old concrete and re-bake it so
that it can be used again as new cement. It would also be mad to do so:
far better simply to mince it up and use it as filler for the new concrete
and bake a bit more of Portland to provide the cement itself. We really
tend not to do things that lose value in that manner: what would be
the incentive for anyone to do so?

Some recycling is hugely beneficial. But not all recycling is, this is the economic point that we've got to keep beating into people. It's entirely possible to recycle to the point of making us all poorer which isn't the point of the exercise at all. Recycle where it is profitable to do so and do not recycle where it isn't. And no (as the last section of the book proves) there isn't anything we're about to run out of which makes it urgent or necessary to have those closed loop systems.

No, really, there isn't. We're not about to run out of aluminium, tin, copper, rare earths or anything else that we currently use in industry.

That’s about to change. The company is set to announce a new, unprecedented goal for the tech industry to “stop mining the earth altogether.”

The announcement, part of Apple’s 2017 Environment Responsibility Report released Wednesday, will commit the company to making devices entirely from recycled materials such as aluminum, copper, tin, and tungsten. But there’s one hiccup: Apple doesn’t know exactly how it’s going to make that happen.

The full report is here. There're a few little details which don't make much sense on a technical basis:

We believe our goal should be a closed-loop supply chain, where
products are built using only renewable resources or recycled material.
We already have programs in place to ensure the finite materials we use
in our products are sourced responsibly through strict standards and
programs on the ground that drive positive change.

That all rather depends upon what your definition of finite is. Most of the things we're using in tech devices have millions of years of supply left. Given the average existence span of a species is 2 million years or so then I think there's probably enough around for humanity. Yes, I'm aware that some, like Greenpeace, differ on this but that's because they simply do not understand the points up above about the definitions of what there is out there. All too many people talk about mineral reserves for example. But that, in simple vernacular, is really just the stock at the mines that are already open. It's entirely nothing to do with--no, really bears no relationship at all--with the amount of whatever it is that is out there that we can use. All of these worries about how we're going to run out of stuff stumble on this one very simple misunderstanding.

Mineral reserves are the stuff we've prepared for us to use in the next few decades. Mineral resources are what we're really pretty sure we could prepare to use at current prices and technologies and make a profit. And after that there's those vast great expanses of the Earth that we've not even gone to have a look at yet in the necessary detail.

The net effect of all of this is that in any useful sense--thinking in less than thousands of years--mineral resources and metals just aren't a finite resource. Thus, obviously, we shouldn't be spending money on devising systems which assume that they are.

As we embrace the circular economy and embark on this journey, we’re
tailoring our approach to the specific properties of each material and how
we use it. Each project is a bit different.
For aluminum, we found that one of the best sources of recycled material
was our own products and processes. This is because we specify such
a high grade of the material—it’s part of what makes our products so
strong and durable. Today, the only way to keep aluminum at this level
of quality is to keep a clean material stream—not to mix it with existing
scrap aluminum, which is what typically happens at recycling facilities.
Our challenge is to recover the aluminum from our products without
degrading its quality.

Well, I'm a bit dubious about claims of high quality there. Certainly, they're not using the standard secondary alloys that come out of the scrap recycling system but I would seriously doubt that they're using anything terribly special. And yes, I have spent some years working with aluminium alloys. However, the basic idea of recycling aluminium is terribly sensible indeed. Not because the raw material is in short supply, we're not going to run out of useful Al atoms this side of the heat death of the universe. Rather, turning the standard ore, bauxite, into aluminium oxide and then aluminium metals is energy intensive. Just the oxide to metal part costs around and about $900 per tonne of metal in electricity. When we recycle aluminium that's what we're really recycling, that energy, not the Al atoms themselves. This is one of those times when the answer is obvious. Recycling aluminium is profitable, meaning that we must be using fewer resources to produce the recycled material than digging up more virgin ore to do so. So, of course, we should do it.

For tin, we took a different approach. Unlike aluminum, there is an existing
market supply of recycled tin that meets our quality standards. So we
are tapping into that supply for iPhone 6s, and now using 100 percent
recycled tin for the solder on the main logic board, where the majority of
tin in the device is found.

Again this is entirely logical. One route, a sensible route that is, to recycling tin off circuit boards is a process that also takes the gold off the pins and connectors for the chips. We use very much less gold to do this these days, an old Intel 80286 is worth some $5 for the gold content alone, a modern chip perhaps 5 cents. But still, we can get both the tin and the gold (and back when we used it in solder, the lead as well) off in one process. Which then requires electrolytic refining to separate them. And electrolytically refined tin is indeed better for electronics and has usually sold at a price premium as a result. This is all fine.

But there's also a mention of tungsten in there and that's an interesting example of why we might not want to be too insistent here. For the standard method of tungsten recycling is to throw the stuff you want to recycle into the pot with some virgin material you're going to process anyway. And given that a major use of the metal is in tungsten carbide, which is then used to make mining machines where bits flake off and get lost to any recycling possibility there's always going to be virgin material processed. So, it's feasible, certainly, to have a closed loop system, where electronics tungsten gets exclusively recycled into more electronics but that would be a very expensive way of doing it. The global industry just isn't set up that way and on grounds of economic efficiency shouldn't be.

Again, worth noting that tungsten recycling isn't exactly a new idea, a substantial portion of the global supply is recycled each and every year. It's only the closed loop approach that wouldn't be warranted here.

Of course, there are always some, like Greenpeace, who aren't quite getting the point here:

Greenpeace, however, thinks that’s not enough. The non-profit praised Apple’s commitment, but had a caveat: it also wants the company to make devices that last longer and are easier to repair.

Sigh. The smartphone isn't even a decade old yet (not quite) and we've been though 7 iterations of Apple's design so far. The technology is progressing by leaps and bounds and Greenpeace wants them to last longer? Why? How many of the original iPhones would still even be functional on a modern network? Well, if we take modern to mean 4G then precisely none of them of course.

But to return to the basic economic point:

Research has shown that it takes nearly 165 pounds of raw material to make the average smartphone – and these resources are on the verge of disappearing.

The resources aren't on the verge of disappearing, nothing like. There is no shortage of any metal or mineral on anything like a human timescale. Recycling makes sense when it's profitable but only then just because we're not about to run out of things. Maybe Apple's just doing this for the PR because there's no economic reason.