Exclusive first look: Daisy is Apple's new robot that eats iPhones and spits out recyclable parts

Inside a facility in Austin, Texas, there's a huge box filled with hundreds of dead iPhones. It's a salad of smashed screens and bent cases that spans nine different models--from iPhone 5 to the iPhone 8 plus, minus the plastic 5C (sorry, little guy). These devices are waiting for their chance to travel through Daisy, Apple's new robotic disassembly system. Daisy salvages raw materials, so they can be recycled, rather than join the more than 35 million tons of e-waste that hit landfills in 2016. Daisy addresses many needs for Apple--from sustainability to secrecy--but its explicit purpose is to separate the phone into discrete parts, which the company can send out for processing by its partners.