Apple uses advanced robots and AI to detect recyclable material from discarded phones. It's a work-in-progress as the number of phones it can process each year is nowhere close to the number of phones that are discarded, but progress starts at the bottom and works its way up.
At its current pace, Daisy can strip up to 1.2 million iPhones a year. It’s a massive improvement over earlier models, but it’s ultimately a drop in the bucket, compared to the 150 million smartphones that were discarded in 2023 (roughly 416,000 per day).
https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/03/inside-apples-efforts-to-build-a-better-recycling-robot/
