Apple first promised a mining-free future back in 2017, saying it planned to eventually create all its devices from 100% recycled materials.

The company said at the time that it didn’t yet know how to achieve this, and experts today point to some of the challenges the company will face along the way to this grand vision …

Apple first set out its goal in its 2017 Environment Responsibility Report, with environment lead Lisa Jackson expanding on it.

‘Closed-loop’ means that Apple recycles its own older products back into materials which are then used to make new ones. This contrasts with ‘open-loop,’ where it instead sells the recycled materials on the open market, and separately buys the recycled materials it needs for production. Closed-loop is by far the bigger challenge as the company would have to extract all the materials it needs from discarded Apple products.

We’re actually doing something we rarely do, which is announce a goal before we’ve completely figured out how to do it. So we’re a little nervous, but we also think it’s really important, because as a sector we believe it’s where technology should be going.

A fascinating long-form piece in Gizmodo examines Apple’s current progress toward a mining-free future, and the obstacles which stand in its way.

Apple made a big deal of the fact that the new MacBook Air with Retina display is made from 100% recycled aluminum, but iFixit says that’s both easy to achieve and a money-saver for Apple.

The question is whether that’s a future Apple truly wants—or one that its investors will allow.

Rare earth materials are much harder.

“Their milling-machine approach to manufacturing is incredibly wasteful, so they’d have to recapture the metal or it wouldn’t be economical,” Kyle Wiens, CEO of the electronics repair company iFixit, said in comments emailed to Gizmodo, adding that aluminium was the “lowest hanging fruit” on Apple’s 100 per cent recycling pledge.

Cobalt, too, is a big challenge. In theory, Apple’s iPhone-recycling robot Daisy helps with this, but no-one knows the scale at which it operates.

When it comes to extracting rare earths from technology in a way that makes recycling economical, the fundamental chemistry still needs a lot of work, according to University of Pennsylvania chemist Eric Schelter, whose lab is focused on this very problem.

“The science and engineering is not at the place to support Apple at that goal without having a $5,000 iPhone,” Schelter told Gizmodo.

And extracting raw materials from recycled electronics introduces potential problems of its own.

Other experts say that recycling is the least important of the three Rs (re-use, repair, recycle), and it’s not in Apple’s financial interest to have people do the former two.

The whole piece makes for a really interesting read.

And yet that’s exactly the sort of thing that needs to be happening more often for a mining-free future to ever materialise.

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