⚡Recycle Your iPhone
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Recycling iPhones
Companies love telling us to recycle. It’s been an easy way for them to pass the buck onto consumers while they continue churning out products that eventually end up in landfills. Don’t get us wrong, we still think that everybody should continue recycling - but it’s high time that companies start doing so too. Today, we’re going to highlight how Apple is beginning to address its massive electronic waste footprint.
Meet Daisy. She lives in Austin, has 5 arms, and loves spending her day ripping apart iPhones. Over the past year, Daisy has taken apart hundreds of thousands of iPhones, at a rate of 200 phones an hour, to access the already valuable materials inside.
Why? Smartphones are made of dozens of materials, including valuable materials like gold and silver. Reusing these materials would not only be beneficial for the planet but also for Apple’s bottom line. In the future, Apple’s goal is that all products would be made from recycled or renewable materials, so any materials in yesterday’s iPhone could be used to make tomorrow’s. While Daisy’s focus is just on a handful of materials today, the R&D team is continuing to push towards a “100% recycled iPhone.”
Case Study - Cobalt. Apple’s batteries are made with cobalt and a majority of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Cobalt mining is, unfortunately, a very unsustainable mining process - it’s usually done by hand in dangerous pits, and the mining waste pollutes drinking water. Luckily, earlier this year, Apple announced that it was using recycled cobalt in all new batteries for the first time because of Daisy.
Addressing traditional recycling. Daisy is clearly doing an amazing job, and Apple actually has two of her today. However, with a price tag of over a million dollars, this is far from a scalable solution (does Apple offer anything cheap?). Most recycling plants around the world cannot afford such technology, despite Apple’s offer to give away its IP for free. Rather than try to send all the iPhones from around the world back to a few specialized machines, Apple should also consider how to make incremental changes to existing machines.
Our take. It’s exciting to see Apple take such significant steps to recycle their products. While Daisy alone is pretty impressive, Apple seems to be thinking very intentionally on how to make the full value chain more sustainable.
More than just lights
Energy poverty is a misguided way of thinking about the way power drives economic development. The traditional hypothesis is that if you simply give everybody access to energy, a country will become far more prosperous. People in this camp love pointing to Ghana -
What they’ll tell you: Ghana is close! The country’s national household electrification rate has hit 85%. It’ll hit 100% soon, and according to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Ghana will be celebrated as a modern energy success.
What they won’t tell you: The employers in the country pay some of the world’s highest prices and suffer regular outages. The expensive and unreliable system is impacting their ability to grow and create jobs.
We want to break down 5 myths associated with energy access and energy poverty, and why today’s approaches are far from enough:
Myth 1: Lights = Modern Energy - Lights are a small fraction of electricity use. In the US, they are only 8% of overall consumption and getting smaller due to more energy-efficient lights like LED. Modern energy should include energy at scale for services like telecommunications, production, data, and everything else.
Myth 2: Energy Access Solves Energy Poverty - The SDGs call for “modern energy for all,” but the way it is measured is simply basic electricity in every household. This is equivalent to claiming education is very important and necessary for success and then only teaching people basic grammar.
Myth 3: Emerging Markets Don’t Need Big Power - This argument claims that emerging markets will leapfrog past heavy industry. However, there is simply no proof that this would occur. No economy has reached prosperity without industrialization, which requires high energy consumption.
Myth 4: Africans Will Have to Consume Less Energy - According to some, since climate change will affect Africa the most, they’ll intentionally have to consume less energy. This is an absurd argument. Yes, climate change will affect Africa significantly, worse than Europe or North America, but better infrastructure will need to be built to survive extreme weather. This includes cold storage due to rising temperatures and pumped irrigation for agriculture.
Myth 5: Today’s Tech is Enough - We do have more technology than ever before, but we need to keep investing in R&D. Innovation must be focused on the markets where most energy infrastructure will be built in the next few decades. What’s worked in other countries and cities won’t necessarily work in Nairobi or New Delhi.
Short Takes
Private equity investors are relying more on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals to guide their funding choices in emerging markets
The Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Michael Kremer for their work done in fighting global poverty.
Global Fund donors pledge US $14B in fight to end epidemics
Check out this graph showing rising oil company emissions over time
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 16
Feeding Our Future: Perspectives Across the Value Chain in Food Sustainability
Join the NY + Acumen Impact Circle on World Food Day for a discussion on the future of food sustainability. They will explore different perspectives across the various parts of the value chain, including investment, production, distribution, and waste/renewability.
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17
War Stories from the Trenches - Fundraising for Startups Solving the World’s Greatest Challenges: Early-stage fundraising can be very challenging, and this is even further the case for social enterprises. Check out this event for a discussion on best practices for opening and closing a round to solve the world’s greatest challenges.
MONDAY OCTOBER 28
Conversations on Plant-based Entrepreneurship: Vegpreneur is a global entrepreneurs community that is made up of innovators who are building a plant-based future and they’re hosting an evening panel on the state of plant-based entrepreneurship at General Assembly. Light snacks and refreshments will be served.
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