Few recycling plant employees had access to the secure room, which some people called the “apple cage.” A small team of employees worked behind locked doors, past metal detectors and under surveillance cameras. GEEP Canada Ltd.An e-waste processor north of Toronto was sifting through pallet-sized boxes filled with used iPhones. They manually pried each one open on a series of tables, removed the batteries and other parts, and dumped the parts into bins. Once enough items have been piled into one bin, a forklift truck transports them to a large area of the warehouse, where the contents are dumped into a large industrial shredder, which makes a loud noise and shreds the equipment into smaller pieces. It was crushed into
Even if the iPhone looks good enough to be resold, Apple.‘s contract with GEEP (represented by a hard “g”) explicitly required that all products sent be destroyed. In Apple’s view, these devices are typically the kind that are disposed of in-store when customers upgrade to a new model or collected from trade-ins, and are discarded for precious metals rather than refurbished products. It is considered better. And Apple was scrapping a lot. In the first few years of working with GEEP, the company shipped more than 530,000 of his iPhones, 25,000 of his iPads, and more than 19,000 of his Watches.
