Apple harvests a precious US$ 40 million

Global – Apple succeeded in recovering US$ 40 million worth of gold from its recycled devices last year, the company confirms in its annual ecological report. More than 2200 pounds of the precious metal – worth around US$ 40 per gram at present – was salvaged.

‘In 2015, we diverted more than 89 million pounds of e-waste from landfills,’ Apple also notes. ‘That’s 71% of the total weight of the products we sold seven years earlier.’

This means the company extracted 61 million pounds of steel, aluminium, glass and other industrial materials from discarded gadgets via its take-back scheme, entailing approximately 6612 pounds of recovered silver (worth US$ 107 577 in profit) as well as 23 million pounds of steel, and 2.9 million pounds of copper (worth US$ 6.4 million in profit).

Besides this metals harvest, Apple also recovered 13 million pounds of plastics.

The World Gold Council estimates there to be around US$ 9 worth of gold in an average desktop computer, while smartphones are said to contain about a dollar’s worth of the precious metal.