Apple appears to have given up on pursuing a lawsuit against an electronics recycling contractor called GEEP, with whom it had a contract to handle more than a quarter-million iPhones a year.
The phones, which are in good condition and were either traded in or recycled by Apple, were supposed to be wiped, refurbished, and sold in the used smartphone market.
Apple discovered that at least 99,975 of them were instead shipped to China by GEEP, where they were sold, Bloomberg first reported, citing 9to5Mac.
Apple sued GEEP for breach of contract in 2020, but the tech giant has not taken any action to move the case forward since then.
The lawsuit is set to be automatically dismissed in January 2025 if Apple does not make any further legal moves. A separate lawsuit filed by GEEP against three former employees it says were responsible for the alleged iPhone theft is also set to be automatically dismissed in August 2024.
So why would Apple—which sent GEEP more than 530,000 iPhones, 25,000 iPads, and 19,000 Apple Watches in the first two years of their recycling contract—drop what seems like an easy legal win?
It appears Apple does not want the public to know that it has been recycling hundreds of thousands of perfectly good iPhones that could eat into sales of new, more expensive models.
Many of the iPhones that Apple pays to have destroyed are prime candidates for refurbishment, the report notes.
This behavior conflicts with Apple’s claims that “reuse is our first choice.” The company has also pledged to reach 100 percent carbon neutrality across its products’ lifecycles by 2030.
Remember when Apple bragged about its Daisy recycling robot that could supposedly disassemble hundreds of iPhones per hour to harvest their reusable parts?
Bloomberg suggests that Apple’s media-friendly Daisy rollout was just an attempt to manufacture positive public relations.
The report notes that around the same time Apple was showing off Daisy in the Netherlands, employees at Re-Teck—one of the company’s recycling partners—said they witnessed tons of AirPods, Apple Watches, and Macs being crushed.
Even devices that appeared to be in working order were allegedly smashed with hammers by Re-Teck employees…
