Our goal is to one day make every Apple product with 100% recycled or renewable materials. To achieve that, we need to design devices to use more recycled content and make sure these materials get recovered when products reach end-of-life. When we use recycled and renewable materials, we lower our reliance on mining, shipping, and processing raw materials, thereby reducing our carbon footprint and conserving precious natural resources.
Aluminum is one of our most widely used materials, and it represented over a quarter of our product manufacturing footprint in 2015. So we developed a 100% recycled alloy that still meets our high standards for performance and durability.
The new Apple Watch Series 8 and Apple Watch SE use 100% recycled aluminum in their cases — joining all iPad models, MacBook Air, Mac mini, and the 14‑inch and 16‑inch MacBook Pro models. Thanks to these changes, aluminum made up less than 10% of our 2021 product manufacturing footprint.
Every Apple product contains materials that can be used to build new ones. And research from our Material Recovery Lab in Texas helps us reclaim more of those building blocks with innovative tools and technologies.
Daisy and Dave, our disassembly robots, take apart iPhone devices and components to recover crucial materials like gold, cobalt, tungsten, and rare earth elements. These collected materials make it back to the raw materials marketplace so that we, and others, can use recycled materials for the next generation of products.