Apple is known for innovation — and increasingly for its environmental commitments. Its progress report pledges deeper recycling of product materials, and one of them is gold.
Gold in Apple products
The average iPhone contains about 30 milligrams of gold (per supply-chain group Fairphone) — in the coils, motherboard and internal contacts, where its conductivity earns its keep. With 200+ million iPhones sold in 2019 alone, Apple is estimated to have used 3.5 tonnes of gold that year.
Meet Daisy, the recycling robot
Recovering that gold by hand is impractical, so Apple built “Daisy” — a robot that strips reusable metals from old devices. A recycler can extract as much gold and copper from 1.4 tonnes of Daisy-processed modules as from far larger volumes of raw ore.
Scale check: 30 mg per phone sounds tiny — but a million phones is 30 kg of gold. Electronics recycling is a real mine; your kitchen drawer just isn’t big enough to be one. For households, jewellery remains the gold worth selling.
Your old phone belongs in e-waste recycling — but your old jewellery belongs on our scale.
