The smartphone in your pocket contains aluminum, copper, rare earth elements, and several other critical materials—the same materials critical to renewable energy technologies, such as lithium batteries and electric vehicles.
But making and processing these materials for use across multiple industries, such as appliances, accounts for around 20 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions.
Apple, a longtime leader in sustainable practices, set out in 2017 to one day make its products using only 100 percent recycled and renewable materials. Use of circular materials lowers overall emissions, circumvents the added pollution and energy consumption from mining and refining new materials, and helps diversify sourcing by tapping into local and home markets.
In 2024, 24 percent of the materials shipped in Apple products, by weight, came from recycled sources. To scale its efforts—and help identify broader market opportunities for decarbonization and circularity—Apple worked with McKinsey to realize a deeper understanding of circular value chains across multiple industries for materials like copper, aluminum, and rare earth elements, among others.
Apple experts collaborated with McKinsey to further explore the current landscape and new opportunities for circular materials: What materials get lost in production after reaching end-of-life; which untapped scrap pools have the most potential; and what actions, alliances, and regulatory conditions are needed to get there.
See how this new deep understanding of the material value chain can catalyze an increase in the use of circular materials across multiple industries.
How Apple is helping unearth a path toward increasing the global use of circular materials
As the need for recycled materials continues to grow, Apple worked with McKinsey to understand how expanding circular value chains could help meet the demand.