alt Hacker News> The new AirTag is designed with the environment in mind, with 85 percent recycled plastic in the enclosure, 100 percent recycled rare earth elements in all magnets, and 100 percent recycled gold plating in all Apple-designed printed circuit boards. The paper packaging is 100 percent fiber-based and can be easily recycled.
I'm no material scientist, but this seems pretty impressive to me that Apple's economy of scale can pull this off, and upgrade the device capabilities, for less than $30 USD.
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Recycled metals have always been cost effective. Recycled plastic is much more expensive than virgin plastic, but it's a very small materials cost to start with, likely totaling only a few cents.
How does that compare to previous AirTag? Whats the industry baseline for all of those, maybe gold is 100% recycled anyways in most products?
The wholesale material costs for the plastic, gold plating, and magnets is all just pennies, if that.
This is just green washing on the level of “93.65% natural ingredients”.
I don't see old-gen airtags for sale on the website. Are they throwing them all out?
I'd be a little wary of these numbers as regulation around advertising these kinds of figures normally permits mass balance systems[0] (which imo is tantamount to straight-up lying).
Mass balance is better than nothing I guess, & I understand the practical challenges with going further, but ultimately it's not what's implied by the marketing.
[0] https://www.iscc-system.org/news/mass-balance-explained/
Just stating the obvious that not buying one of these things that we never seemed to need until they told us we needed it is the only way to have "the environment in mind".
but then the fob also costs $30 :/
Building an attachment point into the tag itself is still beyond current technology though. We just don't know how to do it.