In an industrial park in Austin, there is an unmarked building where a group of researchers are working on a black technology. Inside the large transparent glass enclosure, the automatic robotic arm can move quickly and accurately left, right, up and down on the conveyor belt. Several technicians wearing blue lab coats, goggles and gloves stared at the tumbling movement of an arm in the thick fog.

The fog is caused by the extreme cold indoors, which can drop to minus 112 degrees. A loud mechanical clang broke through the low hum of the machine's operation and produced a uniform thud.

Called Daisy, the complex system combines automation and human touch to separate pure plastic, metal and glass fragments from unusable iPhones. It was this robotic system that brought Apple its coveted results.

When the Daisy robot debuted last year, it was able to disassemble 15 different iPhone models (starting with the iPhone 5) at a rate of 200 units per hour. The Austin lab's machine and another in the Netherlands combined are processing about 1 million of the 9 million iPhones collected through Apple's trade-in program since April (most of the others go into the refurbishment and resale process).

Traditional e-waste recycling facilities are less sophisticated than Daisy's, with most plants relying on cumbersome machines to crush the product and then pour the finished product into containers where the particles are mixed. As a result these mixed streams are harder to recycle, and a large number of elements are discarded in the process.

Lisa Jackson, Apple's vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, said: "We spent a lot of time on this project to make the device recyclable, and Daisy ensured that we had an efficient way to disassemble the product's system." Daisy not only represents a breakthrough in electronic recycling efforts--robots take electronic devices apart piece by piece--but also represents a vision to minimize environmental impact.

Apple has always prided itself on its green credentials, with a large portion of its supply chain powered by renewable energy, for example. Now, it's turning its attention to an equally thorny problem: the rapidly growing and often toxic debris of discarded electronic equipment.

How to manage e-waste is becoming an increasingly complex problem. According to data from the Global E-Waste Monitor, 44 million tons of e-waste were generated globally in 2016, which is equivalent to the height of 4,500 Eiffel Towers. Rochester Institute of TechnologyCallie Babbitt, an associate professor at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said: "As companies launch sleeker and smaller products, the total amount of e-waste is actually decreasing. But a new problem is emerging. The products we now use rely on increasingly complex mixtures of rare earth materials and precious metals. As companies launch new products faster and faster, automated systems may have difficulty keeping up with market demand."

Apple refuses to estimate how much of its products turn into electronic waste. The company sold 217.7 million iPhones last year, with an average of about 0.15 kilograms each. This means that Apple has invested more than 30,000 tons of electronic materials in households around the world through mobile phones alone. If consumers have better choices, some of them will be discarded and become harmful waste that pollutes the earth.

In 2017, Apple announced a crazy-sounding goal: to eventually make all of its products using recyclable or renewable materials, and to use only such materials.

Apple has not said exactly when this goal will be achieved. However, the Material Recovery Lab, which opened in April this year, is part of an ongoing process, and the company is working hard to turn experiments into reality.

It lists the materials used in 14 products and hopes to eventually fully recycle them.

One of the more critical ones is plastic - plastic takes hundreds of years to decompose and releases harmful toxins when corroded, posing a threat to plants, animals and ecology. And then there's lithium, which is contained in rechargeable batteries and mining lithium can wreak havoc on the environment. With Daisy's help, Apple has made these 14 materials recyclable. Currently, the tin and aluminum in new products such as MacBook Air have been fully recycled.

Apple wants to improve not just its own production processes, but how the industry as a whole recycles materials. Part of its Austin facility is dedicated to extensive research and development on e-waste recycling, hoping to innovate equipment to recycle more materials and improve the consumer technology supply chain.

To achieve this goal, it is a long road for Apple and requires the joint efforts of many people in the industry. Even some among Apple executives didn't believe it was possible, but engineers and team members worked hard to discover that full recycling was not only possible, but critical.

“If you don’t want Apple to produceThe ultimate fate of products is the garbage of the earth. We can only spend time on research and money investment to ensure long-term use of hardware and reuse materials to change insurmountable problems. "