Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2bitencryption | Hacker News Reader

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What's "100 percent recycled cobalt"?

The cobalt is either recycled (100%), or it's not (0%).

How much of this "100% recycled cobalt" makes up a single battery?

Is it 10%? 1%? 99%?

Is the battery 10% made of 100% recycled cobalt, and 90% made of non-recycled material?

I hate this "100% recycled" wordplay. Any reasonable person would interpret it to mean "the batteries are 100% recycled" which seems to not be the case, given how sly they are being with the description.

Still, kudos to the recycling effort, but don't try to trick me.

It's the same trick nearly every company in the US plays with "made from 100% reclaimed ocean plastic."

Sure, it is made from plastic that 100% was reclaimed from the ocean. But if that plastic only makes up 1% of the item, and the rest is 99% non-recycled plastic, then you're effectively just tricking any individual not paying attention.

It seems to read reasonably unambiguously to me, I think. I interpreted it to mean:

Of the cobalt that is used in making the batteries, all of it came from sources that had previously been used in something else, subsequent to it having been mined originally. None of it came from cobalt where it was mined and then this is its first use in a product.

And then there being no other claims about the recycled-ness or lack thereof about the rest of the battery.

Really? I feel like the interpretation is pretty obvious, that all of the cobalt in the batteries is recycled - but no promises or indicators about how much of the battery consists of cobalt.

It doesn't feel like trickery to me, but it certainly doesn't paint the full picture.

Is English your first language? This is pretty clear to mean that 100% of the cobalt used in the production is recycled and not sourced from outside their supply. If their production used some recycled cobalt and that filled in gaps using sourced cobalt, then that wouldn't be 100% recycled.

If you click the header of this page, you can read an entire article titled “Apple will use 100 percent recycled cobalt in batteries by 2025”, and find the answer to your question.

Also, the phrase “use 100 percent recycled Foo”, though in principle ambiguous, AFAIK is only used to mean “100% of the FOO we use is recycled”.

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