Apple sued the contractor, but dropped the case — probably to avoid publicity about its anti-environmental practices. It is speculated that the company destroys perfectly good old devices to keep the demand for new ones up.
The details of the story are outlined in a long Bloomberg reportbut the main point is this: Apple accepts old devices from customers for trade-in and recycling, but most are still in good working order and can be refurbished and resold on the used market. Instead, the company has paid an outside contractor known as GEEP to shred more than a quarter of a million of them a year.
In the first two years of this contract, Apple sent GEEP more than 530,000 iPhones, 25,000 iPads, and 19,000 Apple Watches. However, an audit of the company found that at least 99,975 working iPhones intended for shredding ended up in China, where they are sold on the second-hand market.
In 2020, Apple sued the contractor for breach of contract, but nothing has happened since then — the case was automatically dismissed in January 2021, and it seems that the iPhone maker has no plans to renew it. The same applies to GEEP’s lawsuit against three former employees who were accused of theft (the lawsuit expires in August this year).
In fact, information about the lawsuits first surfaced back in 2020 — the same year Apple publicly pledged to achieve 100% carbon neutrality over its product lifecycle by 2030 and stated in an environmental report that «reuse is our first choice». The shredding, according to critics, contradicted Apple’s environmental marketing — and it is likely that the destruction of perfectly good old devices was carried out to keep demand for new ones up.
Apple declined to comment on the details of the case, but noted that things have changed since then» and it now creates «durable products that often serve multiple owners».