Apple Equipment Recycling for the US
Apple supports the environmentally sound, economically efficient management of Apple products throughout their life cycle. Apple advocates flexible policies that involve the sharing of responsibility among all entities in the product life cycle.
As a first step, Apple's Environmental Health and Safety Department, through its Recycling group, has developed a program to provide a product end of life management option for purchasers of Apple equipment. This end of life program is currently available to all Apple customers. The customer pays a fee that covers the "reverse logistic" of shipping the unit from the customer location(s) to the Apple recycling vendor. This includes the shipping of a packaging (if needed) and prepaid shipping label to the customer's location, and brief instructions on how to package and return the unit. We began this program in May 2001 for our educational sales group and have now extended it to include all Apple customers. More information can be found at:
http://www.recycleapc.com/Apple/
Our recycling partner on this program receives all of the equipment, inventories it and prepares it for recycling. This process diverts 85 - 90% of each unit from landfill and into beneficial uses in other markets.
Apple uses great care in selecting partners for this program to ensure that equipment sent through this program is managed in an environmentally responsible manner through periodic audits of each vendor.