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Comment by 2four2 | Hacker News Reader

"By contrast, Apple has been an industry leader in reducing its use of plastic. It uses paper for packaging, and metal rather than plastic for its computer line."

Okay

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I was surprised by this line which came out of nowhere until I went back and re-read which site it was on.

That’s only fair, pretty much every company would require insiders only speak positively about the company in public, if at all :)

Were they not recently caught destroying huge numbers of devices when they sued the company hired to destroying said devices for reselling them instead? I remember reading about that some time ago.

I don't know how that wasn't a much bigger PR issue, but at least I would expect an apple-focused publication to not call them "industry leaders" in such context after that.

Citation needed?

About 20% of devices that were to be recycled were being sold -

https://www.theverge.com/apple/2020/10/4/21499422/apple-sues...

It was the Apple vs GEEP court case, where Apple literally used working devices in those containers to track where they were, even though they were "off" and not recycleable ;)

Apple does not allow recyclers to refurbish their devices, even when they are still fully functioning, by its written contract with the recycling companies.

After it got public and traction, Apple seemed to have just dropped the lawsuit, which was suing for 30M in damages (for 100.000 devices that were being tracked while being shipped and refurbished).

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/10/07/apple-g...

[2] https://thelogic.co/news/exclusive/apple-sues-ontario-electr...

This sentence looks very weird and out of place to me as well. I mean, Apple used metal on MacBooks long before people jumped on the environment bandwagon. And Lenovo and HP use plastic on $200 Chromebooks not because they hate environment, but because plastic is cheap.

Isn't that the point though? Plastic's only cheaper when you're thinking short term and have externalised any non-material costs – which is exactly how capitalism has set us up to think.

In a few special cases plastic is almost certainly the best choice - single use medical supplies come to mind: while "single use" itself is bad, avoiding infection risk is likely worth it in hospital settings for items that a reusable version would be hard to sterilize.

Of course the vast majority of plastic usage doesn't fall into this bucket but is more a matter of plastic having convenient properties while also being very cheap.

>Apple used metal on MacBooks long before people jumped on the environment bandwagon.

Huh? My country (the US) jumped on the environment bandwagon in the 1970s.

This is unrelated but I've been noticing recently a great deal of comments both on HN and Reddit starting with "Huh?"

Is this a developing slang or have I just been under a rock and only noticed it now?

Under a rock. That's been a common interjection for decades in casual conversation, at least in the US.

I can't say for certain about it's commonality online in written form though.

Agreed. As an interjection, consider Scooby's 'Huh?' sound from the early 1970s cartoon series.

I believe that it means "I disagree". It seems common on platforms where language is not sophisticated, but rarely do I see these on HN.

It's worse than that, it's feigned surprise. "I disagree" is at least intellectually honest, "Huh?" is pretending that the position is so far off that they couldn't even understand it.

I learned the term "feigned surprise" from Recurse Center's social rules[1]. It's related to, but not exactly the same as, that well-known XKCD about "today's 10000", too[2].

[1] https://www.recurse.com/social-rules

[2] https://xkcd.com/1053/

Why is it feigned? Why can't it be (mild) genuine surprise?

> Is this a developing slang or have I just been under a rock and only noticed it now?

It communicates disagreement and pushback to perceived aloofness.

Its archetypal form would be an academic making a Monty Python Witch Trial argument being refuted by an average Joe. You generally don't see it followed by a rigorous intellectual argument, because by its framing it's rejecting intellectualism. Put another way, it's a call to common sense. In reality, it tends to reflect an inchoate argument,.

Plastic in a laptop you replace every 3 years is hardly anything like plastic waste coming out of a household. My family produces many times as much plastic waste every month just by shopping food and cleaning supplies at a supermarket and eventually getting rid of the packaging.

It's not nothing though:

50 million tons of e-waste yearly, https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/planet-earth/waste...

Apple sells 21.9 million units/year: https://www.statista.com/topics/10435/apple-mac/

Large distances are covered with tiny steps.

E-waste is generally considered a separate category than plastic, as it contains small amounts of a lot of useful, hard to mine metals - much of which is in the chips, but also the lithium in the batteries. And many of those metals are toxic if ingested so we need to keep them out of the soil and water.

Recycling those is probably far more valuable than recycling plastic, pound per pound. We just make so much plastic.

Apple’s like “oops, sorry we made 4 billion lightning cables that don’t work with new phones now!”

Thanks to an EU regulation mandating type-c connectors

To be honest, Lightning was always dead in the cradle because of it's licensing fee. Apple tried to take the high road for so long, but vendors actively avoided Lightning unless they could buy bootleg, unlicensed connectors. Apple basically took a serial standard hostage, and then insisted that it was okay because they did it before USB-C was finalized. There's no way Apple didn't know from the offset that they were diverging from the standard and creating e-waste, they helped design USB-C. The creation of Lightning was an exploitation of 30-pin's depreciation.

The plethora of crappy, bootleg cables with USB-C connectors that are single purpose (power only, low-speed data only, etc) has created plenty of e-waste, in addition to confusion. I don’t see how this is an improvement over the licensing model, where you know every cable works the same.

The number of “USB-C” things I have that aren’t is infuriating. Won’t use a real charger or PD, only works with an A to C cable, only works when plugged in “right side up”, etc.

At least with Lightning and Micro-B you knew the score.

The good USB-C stuff is great. The rest is worse than B ever was.

What are they exactly? I haven't see such issue in years.

They’re not “real” computer devices but other things with charge ports. One is an air duster, for example.

I also have some credit card payment hardware that is clearly USB-B and they just swapped the port.

The computer world seems fine. It’s everyone else.

The licensed model failed. I own multiple gas-station Lighting cables with no data, only (5w) power. Ultimately everyone converges on the "fuck it, what's the cheapest thing on Amazon" mindset and licensing doesn't help.

But that's what all lightning cables are. Low power limit, low speed data only.

I can put 12w through a lighting cable. That’s fine for most if not all of their iPhones and iPads. Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

> Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

If you keep it turned off for entire day to charge then sure.

You can put 12W through all USB-C cables as well (AFAIK). The crappy ones might be limited to something between 12-50W, while decent ones allow for 100W or more.

According to DannyBee, it was Google, not Apple, that helped design the USB-C connector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30033799

I’m impressed how fast people on HN switched from “Apple is terrible for not dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” to “Apple is terrible for dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” Talk about a zero-downtime migration!

Apple is terrible for using lightning cables in the first place.

Not really. Lightning was better than micro USB-B connector, which was Lightning’s contemporary.

Lightning was the first decent phone connector. USB-C learned good lessons from it.

USB-C is still mechanically inferior. Lightning feels better to use and lasts longer. It always clicks, it’s always snug, it lasts forever. I wish Apple wasn’t so greedy and made it an open standard. Maybe now we would have better connectors on all of our devices.

Eh, having had a lightning connector snap off inside my phone, I don’t mind moving away from it.

It’s wasteful because it contains a chip to verify the cable’s fee was payed to Apple. They’re small but there are a lot of them and they are uneccessary and annoying when they fail and you can’t charge your device.

Different groups of people.

The backlash is mystifying though. MacBooks, iPads, and Beats had been shipping with USB-C for years, a standard Apple was heavily involved in creating in the first place. Most other manufacturers had already standardized on it. Unless you lived in a very strange bubble of only interacting with iPhones and air pods, you already dealt with USB-C devices. For those very few people in that very limited bubble, the problem was fixed by replacing a single cable. It was a mountain of controversy for a figurative molehill.

The point is that if Apple switched to USB-C in 2016, the same time they only put Thunderbolt ports on MacBooks, we would be looking at much fewer lightning cables. Even if as late as 2020 when almost every android phone is using USB-C, that's still better than iPhone 15 from 2023.

Don't get so excited over one guy.

Also the wording isn't clear, they might have meant the problem was how long they kept making lightning.

Firewire cables are obsolete now too. Their right to repair and cloud locking of devices is a way more egregious waste issue.

Lightning to USB-C adapters are a product that exists,

https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-MacBook-Samsung-Mon...

I have a rat's nest of cables for almost any situation (as any accessory comes with a cable), but my daily drivers are just USB-C cables with adapters at the end.

Not their fault. They are forced by EU law

Agreed. Apple's $3T+ is built on a colossal mountain of e-waste fueled by consumerism. Like bottled water companies saying their plastic caps are 30% smaller.

At least this blatant Apple pandering article is better green washing than the “Mother Earth” marketing stunt.

I was wondering when the HN obligatory Apple bashing will start.

Metal rather than plastic is not a good thing, metal uses far more resources.

We’ll have agree to disagree. Aluminum uses a lot of energy to refine and cast, yes but is more durable and recyclable.

And it doesn't breakdown into billions of micro particles that stay in the environment. (Though lots of micro plastics come from apparel rather than consumer electronics)

Also means your laptop doesn’t snap at the hinges like most plastic ones do.

If you do a full lifecycle analysis on the part plastic usually wins. Even if you recycle the metal, you can burn the plastic (which is the environmentally best way to handle it) and get back virtually all the energy embodied in it.

Using a metal part, when plastic will do, just costs extra energy.

Obviously some things need to be metal for strength, I'm talking about when that's not necessary.

“which is the environmentally best way to handle it”

Citation sorely needed.

Read the rest of this thread. Burning plastic for energy reduces the need for oil from the ground. It's by far the best way to handle plastic.

It removes waste, it's emits less CO2 than pull extra oil from the ground, and it's cheap. You don't get a triple win like this very often when it comes to the environment.

His point might be that the carbon in the plastic will some day be released to the atmosphere, either through decay, combustion, or even digestion. Might as well burn it now and recover some energy in the form of heat from it.

Most metals in common use are recyclable. Whether they actually are recycled or not probably depends on what they're attached to. A washing machine, for example, contains plastic and rubber, and those have to be separated from the metal for the latter to be recycled. Perhaps someone can comment on that.

Copper is of course valuable enough that at times people have stolen copper wiring to sell it for recycling. I don't know whether that's a thing today.

At one point, printed circuit boards contained gold--used, as I understand it, to coat traces (sort of like wires) to prevent corrosion. Tiny amounts, of course, but apparently enough to warrant recycling. I actually knew someone who stripped the traces off of old boards and sold them. Again, I don't know whether that's still a thing.

> Copper is of course valuable enough that at times people have stolen copper wiring to sell it for recycling. I don't know whether that's a thing today.

You can scrap copper for anywhere between $1-$3/lb depending on quantity, quality, and location. Copper is commonly recycled.

But do people still steal copper to sell for recycling? (I suppose I should ask whether they ever did, but I think it's been documented.)

Currently, the US is getting about 60% of steel recycled, and 80% of aluminum. Nucor Steel, the biggest steel company in the US, runs mostly on recycled steel. Their success came from figuring out how to make good sheet metal from recycled steel. Before that, recycled steel was mostly used to make rebar, which is low quality steel.

Here's a Nucor steel plant video.[1] Good overview of the process. Note that this is a spherical video and you can change the camera angle to look around. Seven categories of steel junk go in and are mixed depending on the desired product. The video is a bit vague about how the continuous caster works - that's partly proprietary technology. This particular plant is a joint venture with Yamato, but Nucor has other totally-owned plants.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjxJRaAItow

USGS stats give the iron/steel at ~50%, aluminium at ~53%, and the highest achieved rate for lead, at 75% (largely from batteries IIUC):

[I]n 2018, recycled material as a percentage of apparent supply of various metals, including aluminum, chromium, copper, iron and steel, lead, magnesium, nickel, tin, and titanium, ranged from a low of 22% for tin to a high of 75% for lead (table 1). in 2018, the United states recycled 58.6 million metric tons (Mt) of metals with a total value of $37.7 billion (excluding zinc, for which data were withheld to avoid disclosing company proprietary data in 2018).

2018 Minerals Yearbook: Recycling --- Metals (2018)

<https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2018/myb1-2018-recycling.pdf> (PDF)

Various ways to compute this.[1][2] Steel products and scrap are both imported and exported, which confuses things. The data at [3] above seems to treat steel imports as new metal because their recycling inputs are not known.

[1] https://www.steel.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/AISI-and-SM...

[2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2024/mcs2024-iron-steel...

[3] https://pubs.usgs.gov/myb/vol1/2018/myb1-2018-recycling.pdf

It's interesting that the USGS itself (your 2nd reference) seems to disagree with itself (my own ref). I'd need to dig further into figures to see how that emerges.

(I'm ... somewhat discounting the AISI data as more likely to be skewed industry-positive, that is, with a higher claimed recycling rate.)

It's hard, but the statistics by usage are more clear. Over 90% of automotive and structural steel is recovered. Rebar in concrete, far lower.

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