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Apple made a surprise announcement on Monday that's been more than three years
in the making - something that Apple believes has never been quite done before.
I was recently invited to Apple's headquarters in Cupertino, California and
after a short drive to a mysterious warehouse in an undisclosed location,
I met liam a large-scale robot with 29 robotic arms that carefully disassembles
the pieces of your returned and damaged iPhones.
"What I do have are a very particular set of skills..."
Liam doesn't look like a robot you might imagine doing this type of
work it's no Wall-E or Terminator. Instead it's similar to a horizontal assembly line.
With drills and other tools, Liam removes components such as SIM trays,
screws and batteries of iPhones, bit by bit, so they'll be much easier to recycle than
traditional methods that involve a shredder. Liam completes an iPhone
disassembly process every 11 seconds. It's also projected to handle 1.2
million iPhones each year. With this the company hopes to start a recycling revolution.
It's one effort Apple hopes its competitors will copy.