Last year, Apple extracted about a ton of gold from old phones and PCs.

Many companies that produce high-tech equipment, undertake to recycle outdated / obsolete systems. Apple has long been engaged in the processing of old phones and PCs, and all this is done on a truly industrial scale.

Recently, the company submitted its annual environmental impact report, which contains information on how much has been processed and how many different useful elements were obtained during such processing. In total, about 27 thousand tons of steel, aluminum, gold and other elements were extracted from old devices .

And really a lot of gold was extracted - about a ton. If we take the cost of gold, at the moment about $ 1300 per troy ounce, it turns out that the cost of all this gold is about $ 40 million. In one smartphone of a gold corporation about 30 mg, basically this element is used in printed circuit boards. Now the corporation has learned to extract these milligrams, letting the metal be recycled.

It may have been reworked and part of the gold Apple Watch, where gold is already much more - about 50 grams. But, in general, it is quite difficult to imagine a person who bought gold smart watches for $ 10,000 (and more), and then sent the watch for processing to Apple.
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Old PCs were also involved, in which there are also a lot of useful elements. But the overall picture of last year (in pounds):



The corporation even developed a special robot that skillfully parses old smartphones, sorting out individual parts.



According to the company, the robot can recycle old batteries (cobalt and lithium), cameras (gold and copper), motherboards (silver and platinum), not to mention aluminum (case).