Dismantle 200 mobile phones in one hour! Apple disassembly robot provides new ideas for recycling old products

Electronic products have become an indispensable part of modern people's lives. The speed of electronic product updates and iterations is quite fast, and the products are very rich. At the same time, the amount of product obsolescence is also quite large. The mobile phone you just got may become an old model after half a year.

Therefore, how to deal with obsolete products to prevent them from causing great pressure on the environment and even reduce costs has become a problem that many electronics manufacturers are thinking about.

As a leader in the global mobile phone industry, Apple has always used environmental protection as its slogan, claiming to achieve the goal of 100% carbon neutrality in the supply chain and products. To this end, it also removed the charger from the standard configuration, which once caused heated discussions. Apple has indeed been rated as the most environmentally friendly company for three consecutive years. Apple's solution for the disposal of old electronic products is to use Daisy, a robot that recycles and disassembles Apple devices , to recycle and reuse old Apple devices, thereby reducing the negative impact on the environment and increasing the reuse rate of parts.

Daisy is a highly automated robot that can automatically disassemble many different types of Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches, and recycle the recyclable materials such as metals, plastics, glass, and rare metals separated from them.

Traditional Apple device recycling and disassembly work is mostly done manually, which easily leads to waste of resources. Daisy automatically disassembles and separates recyclable materials and waste, maximizing the use of recycled materials while reducing waste generation and greatly improving disassembly efficiency. The new generation of Daisy recycling robots can disassemble 200 mobile phones in one hour.

Daisy works very efficiently, and its automated disassembly technology is the key to its efficient recycling. Daisy is equipped with multiple sets of robotic arms that can quickly disassemble old devices into hundreds of independent components, including batteries, cameras, screens, printed circuit boards, etc. It uses advanced visual technology and machine learning algorithms to identify the type and status of each component. For example, it can determine whether a battery is still charged and check whether each screen is damaged.

After identifying and inspecting the components, the Daisy robot sorts them into different bins that are labeled according to component type and status. Some bins may contain reusable parts such as screens and batteries, while others may contain non-recyclable components such as plastic casings.

Individual components in the phone need further disassembly to achieve maximum recycling benefits, such as batteries and cameras. The Daisy robot has more sophisticated tools to separate these components. Finally, Apple can produce new devices and parts by recycling valuable materials in these components. For example, recycled lithium-ion batteries can be used to make new batteries, and recycled aluminum can be used to produce new casings.

According to data provided by Apple, Daisy recycled more than 1 million devices in 2019, including 15 different models of iPhones and more than 25,000 tons of electronic waste, bringing fruitful results to Apple's device recycling and reuse program.

Although recycling robots have provided good results for Apple's electronic equipment recycling and utilization, the recycling robots themselves still have many shortcomings, which are also points that manufacturers interested in entering the recycling robot market can pay extra attention to.

First of all, the high cost of Daisy is still a problem. Although Apple has established multiple Daisy factories around the world, seeking the lowest-cost supply chain system and operating recycling robots locally, the cost of Daisy recycling robots is still very high, which may be difficult for other electronic equipment recycling companies to afford. How to reduce the cost of Daisy is a direction that needs to be explored in the future.

Secondly, Daisy can only recycle Apple devices and is ineffective for other brands of electronic devices. Therefore, if other electronic equipment recycling companies want to apply Daisy's technology, they need to invest huge funds and R&D efforts to redesign and develop robots suitable for other brands of devices.

This brings an opportunity to the industry. If a recycling robot is developed that can be adapted to various models of mobile phones through simple specific programming, and a recycling robot is made replicable, the recycling and reuse rates of all electronic products can be greatly improved, and the market space is very broad.

At present, about 2 billion mobile phones are produced every year in the world, but the lifespan of a mobile phone is usually only about 2 to 3 years. According to data from the United Nations Environment Programme, the total amount of electronic waste in the world reaches 50 million tons each year, including hundreds of millions of discarded mobile phones. In developed countries alone, the number of mobile phones discarded each year is close to 100 million. For example, the number of mobile phones discarded in the United States each year is about 100 million, and the number of mobile phones discarded in Germany each year is also close to 100 million.

Some of these obsolete mobile phones can be recycled and reused, but due to the limitations of recycling technology and the market, most of them are still discarded or idle. According to estimates by the United Nations Environment Program, only 20% of electronic waste is recycled and processed each year, while the remaining 80% is discarded in landfills or illegally dumped. If a universal recycling and disassembly robot can be popularized, it will be the first to seize this 80% of the available market.