#could all be a PR stunt for all I know and it’d have no impact on my life whatsoever | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

daisiesonafield-blog · 4 years

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LT2, CO and stunts

*Disclaimer: this is my speculation given the current situation. Things aren’t written in stone, and plans change. We also don’t know things at play behind the scenes that may impact this. So yeah: this is my current speculation.*

I have some ideas about stunts and CO: If what we are seeing right now is them laying down the seeds to move to end stunts, they’ll do it slowly. Those 50 “twins OMG!” articles just came out. Now 1 article about Louis selling his house (bc the other one is just a copy-paste of the same article). If this gets picked up by other tabloids then we can say things are moving forward. Especially because of covid and the music industry being on a standstill, things have to move slower than normal.

As for babygate ending, that could lead to so much publicity for Louis. A scandal like that would be the perfect time for his label to garner some easy free publicity for LT2. Can you imagine how many people would anxiously wait to hear his music and what he has to say about things through his lyrics and in his album. It’d be huge and the perfect storm from a publicity point of view. Like Thank u, next coming out November 3rd, when Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson had broken up in August, with the album then coming out February 8th. So following this timeline, the “scandal” happens, 3 months later you drop a single to massive anticipation and speculation. Maybe you drop another single after that. Then 3 months after the first single dropped, or 6 months after the “scandal” the album comes out. It would be PR GOLD and his label would be dumb not to use it.

So if we are following this theory, we could see them play up the baby daddy stuff up in the media for a while, then start to introduce some doubts, then drop the bomb of *not the father*. Keep in mind this could all go on for months. So we could see LT2 the album in 2022, meaning babygate scandal drops mid-late 2021. This could also work well with covid, leaving enough time so that when the album drops he could do the whole promo/tour cycle if things are back to normal.

In regards to a CO, I don’t personally see it happening any time soon. Not when Louis is still trying to establish his solo career - particularly post Syco. And Harry still owes HS3 and is trying to establish himself as a household name in mainstream industry. So I personally think he will wait a bit longer as well. Things could change if he is in fact the lead in My Policeman, and his team may use that as his CO plan. However, that would affect Louis too, because if Harry comes out, speculation about Louis and their history of Larry Stylinson will soar, especially with Harry having so much media attention. With this being said, it is my personal opinion that they are not coming out any time soon. That is, several years.

And as for Eleanor, I’m not sure. It looks like she’s been quietly distancing herself and she has been at her mom’s for the past few weeks. Also lowkey trying to pass as an influencer and garner brand’s attention - particularly the last few days. However, at the same time, she still posted selfies at the public house this week and keeps posting Clifford. So idk. A bu from her wouldn’t attract that much attention bc she’s a nobody, so idk what their plans are. I could see it happening sooner rather than later, so that they can use a narrative like “after splitting from long-term girlfriend this past December, Louis decided to spend more time with his son. And that’s when he found out he isn’t the father! wow what a shock!”. So again we could see him publicly spending time with F to play out the big *not the father scandal*. And when I say ‘publicly spend time w F’ I don’t mean that he’d necessarily do all those pap walks, bc now F would be like “who tf are you?”, so they may just have a couple pictures here and there, and some statements in print for the tabloids like “a source close to the singer said he has spent the last two weeks with son Freddie”. All bs narrative stuff.

Ok, this is very long now. Again this is all my speculation based on the currently available information. Not written in stone. Things change. My opinion may change as more info becomes available or as things become clearer. I don’t have insider knowledge. I’m just speculating. Also, I may have overlooked something that changes things, so like I said: not written in stone. They could have a completely different plan for everything.

-I had originally posted this as a rb reply to another post, but I think it stands on its own better than as a response. So here you go.

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mariannewhughes · 5 years

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Apple’s Daisy Robot Is Still a Stunt, But Their Other Recycling Ideas Are Good

Apple announced Thursday, four days short of Earth Day, that it is expanding its recycling programs by adding another phone-recycling robot, recovering more cobalt from phones, and building a research lab for electronics recycling. All of that is fine and good, but the robot is still a recycling PR move. Allowing the world to keep iPhones working, delaying recycling even further, would have a more meaningful impact.

Apple’s Recycling More Cobalt. That’s a Good Thing.

Let’s start with the broadly good news about cobalt reuse. Cobalt is a critical metal used in the electrodes of lithium-ion batteries. Demand for cobalt tripled between 2011 and 2016, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, and is projected to quadruple by 2029. The 6.6 grams of cobalt in an iPhone 6 is roughly 5 percent of the phone’s weight, according to The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant, and worth about 23 cents at the time of this writing. Combined with the other raw materials in the phone, that’s enough money to make it economically viable to attempt to recycle it.

60 percent of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, and a lot of it—up to 40 percent—is mined by hand, sometimes by children, in cramped, dangerous holes. An investigation by the Washington Post found that such “artisanal” cobalt is often washed in the same water used for fishing and irrigation, leading to extremely unhealthy metal concentrations in residents. While Apple and other battery-buying companies have pledged to audit their supply chains for cobalt and other problematic metals, it’s extremely difficult to do so in environments with guarded depots, bribery, and byzantine international markets.

So any recycling of cobalt, instead of more mining, is worth some praise. And because it’s so valuable, recyclers go out of their way to recover it. What Apple announced today isn’t an innovative recycling process—it’s a method of tracking to make sure that cobalt from the batteries they recycle makes it back into their own products. It’s paperwork, but it’s important paperwork.

Apple’s press release states that the company has created “a true closed loop” for cobalt. As iFixit’s CEO Kyle Wiens told Reuters, “Cobalt is mined in horrific conditions … Reducing cobalt consumption is a good thing across the board.” For this closed loop to be credible, though, it should be backed up by a third party audit by a credible firm like UL Environment. It’s very possible they did that, and we encourage Apple to release the results of these audits.

Daisy the Recycling Robot Makes No Economic Sense

Now for the showiest portion of the announcement: Apple’s expansion of its press-friendly, proprietary recycling robot, Daisy. Given Apple’s own numbers, Daisy cannot possibly keep up with the scale of their manufacturing output, especially with newer Apple devices’ increasingly shortened lifespan and repair problems. Apple states that each Daisy machine (there are seemingly two of them) can disassemble 15 different iPhone models at a rate of 200 per hour, hypothetically 1.2 million a year. But theoretical throughput is a silly way to describe the process. In recycling, all that matters are real-world results. If you drive your car sixteen hours a day, you could hypothetically go 350,000 miles a year. That doesn’t mean you will—or that you have that many places to go.

How many phones has Daisy recycled? Apple hasn’t told us, only how many devices they have received: 1 million in the last year. Even if Daisy was bullet-proof enough to operate at that sustained rate of 200 phones per hour, though, supply is going to be a problem: Apple doesn’t get that many iPhones back.

Why? People aren’t giving Apple back their phones, because old iPhones are worth dramatically more on the used market than the material cost or Apple’s trade-in value. On Swappa, the 4-plus-year-old iPhone 6 still sells for $100, while Apple will give you a $90 gift card. Even the iPhone 4 nets $40, while Apple offers nothing. You’d be crazy to destroy a perfectly functional $100 product to recover $0.23 worth of cobalt. The recyclers we regularly speak with rarely see newer-model iPhones, and when they do, they repair and resell them. They certainly don’t grind them up for raw materials. Even non-functional phones are parted out and sold to people like us, who are in desperate need of original iPhone service parts.

Putting aside the supply logistics, the idea behind Daisy is compelling: with perfect knowledge of how a device is put together, you can build a machine that reverses the process and separates all the raw components. It’s easy to see why Apple, who excels at mass manufacturing, was drawn to a centralized approach. Just run the Foxconn assembly line in reverse, and use robots!

But, as with so many amazing ideas dreamed up in laboratories, the concept falls short in the real world. While manufacturing is centralized, recycling is not. At end of life, iPhones are more likely to end up at one of the many thousands of recycling facilities around the world than at one of Apple’s 500 stores. Recyclers handle a dizzying variety of products, from smartphones to CRT televisions to plastic Rock Band guitars. Without government or manufacturer subsidies, using a different specialized machine to recycle each model of product is economically impossible.

I asked Kelley Keogh, co-founder of Greeneye Partners, an electronics recycling auditing firm, what she thought of the project. “Without knowing/seeing their AI capabilities and robotics it’d be hard to judge.” But Koegh defended human disassembly: “I have seen very sophisticated facilities do this manually and quite well.”

Daisy’s fatal flaw is its model specificity. Recycling is a challenging business with slim margins. Recyclers need processes that can handle a broad array of tens of thousands of products. An expensive machine that can only disassemble 15 products just doesn’t make economic sense today.

Apple’s New Real-World Recycling Lab Has Promise

After the robot and cobalt news, Apple also announced that they launched a Material Recovery Lab. The 9,000-square-foot facility in Austin, Tex., “will look for innovative solutions involving robotics and machine learning to improve on traditional methods” of recycling. The lab, Apple says, will combine academics and Apple engineers to “propose solutions to today’s industry recycling challenges.”

Robots like Daisy are a radical approach to recycling that does not integrate well with traditional recycling systems. If Apple is going to provide their technical expertise to suggest incremental improvements existing recycling operations, that would be welcome news. Real-world recyclers need cost-effective technologies that they can integrate into their existing facilities.

It’s clear from the size and exceptionally clean sorting machinery Apple is showing off that their space is a lab, not an active sorting facility. If Apple shares their recycling finds with the wider industry, as the release claims they might, that’s a good thing. For this to be effective, this knowledge should be made publicly available for peer review by academics and adoption by recyclers around the world, in contrast with the secretive approach they have taken with Daisy so far.

But while improvements are welcome, the recycling industry has not been idly waiting for input. “I think often [manufacturing engineers] look at the materials recovery space and feel it has lacked effective R&D investment,” wrote Craig Boswell, president and co-founder of asset management firm HOBI International, in an email to iFixit. “This is far from the truth. There has been a tremendous amount of research on material shredding, separation, and cleaning techniques over the past 50 years. There have been a lot of advancements but some of the remaining issues represent tremendous technical challenges. I wish them the best.”

Envisioning a Greener Apple

Apple also touts refurbishing 7.8 million Apple devices in 2018, or about 3.6 percent of the 217.7 million iPhones sold that year. That’s great—reducing and reusing is better than recycling—but we think they could be doing a lot more to make their devices last longer outside their proprietary restoration system. They could allow the home buttons on phones to be replaced and reprogrammed without needing a secretive machine that locks out third-party or DIY repair. They could stop making MacBooks all but unrepairable, with keyboards that necessitate expensive replacements. And they could offer some kind of low-cost recycling approach for AirPods, Apple Pencils, Magic Keyboards, and the rest of their devices with built-in batteries sealed with impenetrable glue.

Hidden behind the chrome glamour of a recycling robot, Apple’s announcements have the glimmer of some positive changes. The recycling lab is a great idea—a little late, but seemingly a move in a good direction. But they are avoiding the larger product design changes that would really benefit the earth. Recycling is good, but repair is noble.

Children at artisanal mine image by Julien Harneis/Wikimedia. Images of Apple’s Daisy and recycling lab via Apple.

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