Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple made a Robot…and I got to test it.”.
I am standing inside Apple’s top secret facility in the Netherlands to be one of the first people in the world to go Hands-On with their new and improved robot and we’re going to put it through its Paces, but to understand what it is and why it exists. We need to grasp the current problem in the smartphone market. That’S me, apparently the truth of it is smartphones are bad for the environment. If you just throw your old phone away in the bin, then one of two things is going to happen. It’S going to either end up sitting in a landfill site, taking up space and contaminating the soil, or it’s just going to end up getting incinerated, releasing toxic chemicals into the air that are damaging to plants, animals and people. This is why almost every big tech company has been practically forced now to provide you with an option to trade in your older phones so that they can recycle it and reuse its materials instead of just dumping them. But even this isn’t great, because smartphones are so unbelievably complex and on top of that, how most companies make 100 different models, they make regional variants.
They make devices constructed from all manner of different materials, it’s almost impossible for them to set up an efficient recycling system that will work for all of them, and so what most companies end up doing is just taking the batteries out shredding the rest of the phone Into pieces like this and then using an incredibly powerful Hammer to pulverize them into something more like this, and at this point you can recover some materials to be reused like you can separate the lighter materials from the heavy ones by blowing air at a certain power And you can separate the metals from the non-metals by using magnets to attract just the metals. But this is where you have problems. There might be 20 different Metals just within one phone. So, even though you could get yourself, some nice assorted, metal, soup, you’ll struggle to actually separate the aluminum from the lithium and the tungsten, and so what you end up with is just in pure materials, which can now only really be used to manufacture, lower quality product.
You can have a small phone constructed from Aerospace grade aluminum, but put it through a process like this, and the only thing it will be good for on the other side is well making the next cat toy. You want some impure metal toys, and that brings us to this Apple’s, 33 foot, long Behemoth of a machine that uses its five robotic arms to manually, pull apart old, iPhones to harvest their organs more effectively and it’s called Daisy and to visually explain what makes this Such a massive leap above the normal recycling process, I’m about to sacrifice an iPhone live in front of your eyes, had a good life son. He was dead before this. I should clarify that so now that I place my phone in we’re actually going to see it. Traveling through the four distinct sections of Daisy getting more and more minutely deconstructed as it goes so in the very first section, Daisy uses a camera up top to take a photo of the phone that I put in.
It then cross-references that, with an internal database to figure out exactly which model it is and therefore how to treat it. I guess this is where Apple benefits versus other companies, because they only make say four different iPhone models per year. Instead of you know, hundreds and the fact that they all share similar components and materials, it does make it feasible that they can have one machine to deconstruct Mall my thoughts and prayers to Samsung if they ever tried to make. One of these am I allowed to say something in here. No, this is kind of crazy, so right here, Daisy, basically checks to see if the iPhone you put in has any imperfections. You know if it’s like a little bit bent out of shape or whatever, and then it alerts the whole rest of the robot so that it can adjust its program and its disassembly according to those imperfections, ah we’re into the second section where Daisy uses a gust Of really cold air, I mean really really cold, like minus 70 degrees Celsius, to freeze the adhesive around the battery and then slap it out like a misbehaving child. You kind of have to separate the battery, because the way that you recycle batteries is very distinct from the way that you recycle, say aluminum.
The third module is all about screwing, more specifically punching out the screws of the remaining parts using the machine’s understanding of exactly which screw is where on every single iPhone and the goal of it is to Prime this phone for section 4, which finishes off the disassembly Excavating the remaining loosened Parts. You know the ram, the motherboard, the speakers to then be sorted by hand into specific piles of each look at all this stuff. Oh my God, Daisy. What have you done? These are all the beaten up iPhone shells, but the cool thing is that pretty much every single material here, because they’ve now been separated into their core components, can be recycled into pure up Market materials holy moly.
Look at these cameras. How many megapixels? Do you think there are in this box now now you might be thinking at this point? It’S a load of faff you’ve got this supremely capable robot engineered to be smarter than most people dissecting these iPhones piece by piece, and even then you still don’t end up with raw materials there’s like 15 other processes that still need to happen. I initially follow the same thing, but there are three things: three things I want to show you that really make it clear how important this thing is and then we’re going to cut the whole thing off with how we can actually save the planet and, if you’re, Enjoying this video, then a sub to the channel would be very buzzing. I actually learned something on this trip, so the very first thing is the numbers.
I know that this Daisy seems like one tiny machine compared to the scale of manufacturing around the world, but it turns out that, because smartphones are so incredibly dense, invaluable materials by taking apart just one ton of iPhones apple is getting the same amount of gold and Copper that they normally get from 2 000 tons of traditionally mined Rock, but there’s also the fact that Daisy works could kind of fast. You saw all those processes that took place right, figuring out which phone it is placing it on like 15 different belts, freezing it smacking it punching it devouring its insides on first glance, it kind of looks like it might take 10 minutes or so per phone, but It actually takes 18 seconds, it really doesn’t last long, and so when you also factor in that there are two daisies one here in the Netherlands and another one in the U.S that works out to 2.4 million iPhones a year, which is enough recycling capacity that actually These machines are half empty right. Now there is room for more phones now. The second thing is that Daisy is not a fixed entity that never changes. She is constantly getting updated just for perspective. In 2013, Apple came out with a recycling robot called Liam to disassemble old, iPhone 5S, but well, he just wasn’t good enough in the screwing stage, which meant that it took him 12 full minutes to disassemble each one, so they improved him launching Liam 2.0, who was An order of magnitude faster, but could still only do one model of iPhone, so they improved him with Daisy.
Who can do everything from an iPhone 5 to an iPhone 12, including the S? Phones, the pro phones, the max phones, everything and even she has now been upgraded since she was first built. The point I’m trying to make is that, even though this 2.4 million recycling capacity, it isn’t close to the 200 million phones that Apple sells in a year as soon as more people start returning their old phones and more capacity is needed. Apple could quite easily make it by either just creating more daisies or creating the next version of Daisy. I have the perfect name for it, but it’s the third thing here: that’s the most important.
The bigger picture, because DC is not the only robot Apple has they’ve got another one Dave who disassembles the taptic engines the little Motors that provide the vibration feedback when you pressed her they’ve got Taz who focuses on recovering rare earth magnets, the tiny but very powerful Magnets that are used in everything from your phone speaker system to your camera’s autofocus mechanism. They even have a robot just to disassemble airpods Pro cases. All of this environmental stuff is all targeted at two major goals. Number one is to become 100 carbon neutral by 2030, meaning that any carb in the Apple emits through its processes will have to be offset by carbon that it takes in through various environmental projects. And it looks like they’re on track for this. Partly thanks to using recycled Parts instead of intensively mining for new ones, partly thanks to Apple, pushing their suppliers to start using renewable energy in their processes and partly just through efficiency improvements in manufacturing to use less carbon in the first place. But then the second goal is to be able to eventually build products entirely from 100 recycled materials. Just imagine holding a brand new iPhone in your hands that everyone wants, knowing that it was manufactured entirely using materials from broken old iPhones that no one wants.
That would be kind of insane, but it’s also a much harder goal to achieve like right now, an average Apple product is made from about 20 recycled materials, and that is pretty much the highest in the industry, but I I do feel like we’re starting to see The first signs of it – I didn’t actually know this, but you see these antenna bands on the iPhone 13 they’re made from upcycled water bottles. Microsoft recently released a computer mouse. That’S made entirely from recycled ocean plastic. Some of the plastic within the latest Samsung phones is made from recycled fishing nets. None of these things on their own are going to change the world, but they are a sign that there’s enough market pressure on these companies that the wheels have started spinning, and that leads me to the final thing. If you want to play your part, what should you do well step a is to just keep your current phone for as long as you’re happy with it, and it’s never been easier to do that.
Samsung’S just started. Giving four years of software updates Apple gives five years. I have an iPhone 10 here from 2017 and apart from mediocre battery life is very usable step B occurs when you then decide to move on to a new phone, at which point you can either trade.
Your current one in earning credit to spend towards it or just sell it yourself or hand it down to a friend or family member, and I would say these options are pretty much equivalent like if you just handed your old phone to your younger cousin. For example. That’S probably the least polluting option: there’s no postage or admin or Logistics involved.
You just you just give it to them. But then, if you do trade it in there is an upside in the sense that companies like Apple and Samsung. They can refurbish it fixing the parts that might be more prone to failure and thus extending its overall shelf life by a couple more years and then step C is what to do if your phone is broken, and at this point the answer is 99 of the Time to just trade it in if it’s still partially functional, then you’ll get paid for it and if it’s lost Beyond hope, then handing it back will at least allow these materials to be used again, as opposed to very slowly breaking down in a field somewhere. And if you are upgrading to a new phone anytime soon, then one way to make the absolute most of it is surfsharkvpn.
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The boss catch you in the next one .