I mean... no. Apple publishes breakdowns/reports of their recycling efforts and it's pretty damn good for what it is, and these devices now last a very long time if you don't feel like chasing the yearly upgrade train.
The selling point of the Fairphone is moreso that it's:
- Attempting to pay fair wages to workers
- Not Apple, for those who just don't want an Apple device
- More (user) repair-able
These are all very valid reasons to want to use something like the Fairphone and I am glad it exists, and it might even be my next phone - but to imply that it wins out over the iPhone trade-in-and-get-it-recycled flow is just bonkers.
> and these devices now last a very long time if you don't feel like chasing the yearly upgrade train.
But they constantly make new devices with incremental improvements and advertise/market for people to upgrade when they don't need to - and people do exactly that.
>to imply that it wins out over the iPhone trade-in-and-get-it-recycled flow is just bonkers.
I made this point in another comment already, but for many people, it isn’t easy to access an Apple Store, and Apple is notoriously stingy with third party authorized repair
I'm not talking about the Apple Care/App Store get-it-fixed flow, I am talking about how when you buy a new iPhone you can quite literally just mail your (hopefully data-cleansed) phone to Apple and they'll recycle it properly. If you're buying your phone through Apple - which you should do, just because phone carriers are ripoffs - then you generally get a credit back to boot.
For the average consumer this is great and encourages sustainable reuse of the core materials throughout the iPhone lifecycle and generally means there is no good reason for iPhones to bloat up landfills or anything.
> For the average consumer this is great and encourages sustainable reuse of the core materials throughout the iPhone lifecycle and generally means there is no good reason for iPhones to bloat up landfills or anything.
But they do though.
A lot of this stuff is corporate PR. For example, recycling aluminum is the default -- it costs less than mining it. You don't get credit for that, it's saving you money and you were going to do it anyway. And the reason it's so cheap is that you can source it from things that are basically pure aluminum, like aluminum cans, even though they're then making something out of it that has to go through a complicated process to separate the diverse materials from each other again.
They have a recycling program for their old devices, but to use it you have to buy a new one. And there's a reason for that -- it's not otherwise cost effective to do it. It's a promotion to drive new sales, because the process is complicated and inefficient.
Because they're trying to turn the device back into raw materials after gluing and soldering them all together. Which is why they go into the landfill unless someone is subsidizing it.
Whereas the best way to "recycle" a piece of electronics is to continue using it as a piece of electronics. Allow the memory or storage to be upgraded to extend its usable life. Have modular parts to minimize the materials necessary to replace before it can go back into service after being damaged, and minimize the cost of such repairs to increase the number of repairs that are economical before a new device has to be manufactured.
It isn't both because they do PR about building a robot that can disassemble iPhones, but there are only two of them in the world and even if they were run nonstop they could only recycle 1% of the iPhones Apple manufactures in the same amount of time.
In the meantime most of the iPhones people trade in are sent to third party "recyclers" who don't recover nearly as much of the materials and are contractually required to shred the devices without recovering functional parts for reuse, even though that would reduce the amount of ewaste by several fold -- once for the device already on its way for the shredder, and again for each of the devices that could have been repaired from its operational parts.
It's a cynical take because it's a cynical marketing ploy.
I swear it's like nobody reads the actual reports that they put out. There is a lot to knock about the Apple/iPhone experience but frankly sustainability just isn't it.
And I will note again, to be clear, that I still think the Fairphone is a good thing. I just don't think it should be held as the highest regard when it's not.
The selling point of the Fairphone is moreso that it's:
- Attempting to pay fair wages to workers
- Not Apple, for those who just don't want an Apple device
- More (user) repair-able
These are all very valid reasons to want to use something like the Fairphone and I am glad it exists, and it might even be my next phone - but to imply that it wins out over the iPhone trade-in-and-get-it-recycled flow is just bonkers.