Austin and Apple seem to go hand-in-hand these days.
After announcing a $1 billion campus in North Austin at the end of 2018, the tech giant is back with new plans to add a 9,000-square-foot Material Recovery Lab in Austin.
It's part of a broad effort by the company to do deeper research on recycling and find new ways to manage the stream of materials being discarded as folks throw away old phones and buy new ones.
At the lab in Austin, Apple's engineering teams will develop robotics and machine learning to innovate on how the company disassembles, sorts and shreds recyclable materials from devices, including iPhones.
As part of the announcement, Apple said it is quadrupling the number of places in the U.S. where people can send iPhones to be disassembled by a phone disassembling robot named Daisy. You can have your old iPhone recycled by dropping it off at Best Buy stores or Apple stores. You can also set it up online.
Apple's robot can take apart about 200 phones in an hour and send batteries, cobalt and other components out for reuse and recycling. Apple has already received about a million devices to be disassembled.
“Advanced recycling must become an important part of the electronics supply chain, and Apple is pioneering a new path to help push our industry forward,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s VP of environment, policy and social initiatives, said in an announcement.
News of the Austin recycling lab follows Apple's December 2018 news conference in which it unveiled plans for a $1 billion corporate campus in North Austin that could handle about 5,000 new employees when it opens and eventually accommodate up to 15,000. The company already had 6,200 Austin employees at the time they announced that.
