NATURE’S BLUEPRINT: DAISY THE ROBOT

DAISY, A ROBOT THAT HARVESTS RARE METALS FROM IPHONES, SHOWS WHAT TECHNOLOGY STANDS TO GAIN FROM MIMICKING THE EARTH’S CIRCULAR RHYTHMS.

By Libby Hsieh

Humans are forever looking forward, forever reaching upwards, forever straining to catch wind of a better tomorrow, hoping it holds the answers that today cannot provide. Never right now, always what’s next. In 1954, Ford’s concept car Atmos brought forth the image of sleek, jet-inspired vehicles gliding through the air. In 1956, General Motors released a 10-minute Technicolor short, Kitchen of Tomorrow, in which the stove top obeyed voice commands and the fridge rotated like a lazy Susan on lithium. And The Jetsons teased cities made of sparkling silver and spanking clean glass, a world where conveyor belt breakfasts, robot housekeepers, and hair- and teeth-brushing automatons were the norm. The pervasive futurism wasn’t just a marketing ploy or post-war optimism. It was—is—the American dream on full display, holding steadfast to the belief that technology can render us into perfection.

Today, our fantasies of the future have been refaced by the consequences of pursuing it. The relentless race toward tomorrow has left tracks behind—actual, visible scars on our planet. Atmospheric carbon dioxide has spiked by over 50 percent since the Industrial Revolution, driving climate change to a breaking point. Millions of tons of plastic do lazy laps in the oceans, swirling in gyres the size of small islands. The automobile industry, which sold us dreams of flying cars and pristine highways, contributes to nearly 30 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. And e-waste, on track to rise 32 percent by 2030, tallied to 62 million metric tons in 2022 alone. Our make-believe transformed into a horrifying nightmare à la Mad Max, and those flying cars got a makeover from Immortan Joe’s dust-covered armada. The product never arrived as advertised. So here we are, still transfixed by tomorrow, but more anxious now. The utopia fantasy has been swapped for an impending dystopia, and we’re left with the sense that maybe we’re taking an axe to the branch we’re sitting on.

“How do we thrive on this planet?” It’s the question at the heart of Sarah Chandler’s work as Apple’s Vice President of Environment and Supply Chain Innovation. Enter Daisy the robot. Not the dystopian kind—Daisy doesn’t want your job or your companionship. She wants the tiny, invaluable elements buried inside your old iPhone: the cobalt, lithium, and rare earth magnets that don’t just grow on trees, or, frankly, anywhere accessible.

Recycling consumer electronics has always been an uphill battle. Before Daisy was Liam, a disassembly system that took over 12 minutes to take apart a single iPhone—not nearly fast enough to disembowel recycled tech at the rate the company produces new ones. Devices are complex, materials are difficult to recover, and traditional recycling systems are not designed to pull out tiny, intricate parts. But the Apple engineers didn’t see Liam as failure; they saw it as an iteration, a chance to evolve even further. “We actually have the original Liam next to Daisy in our Material Recovery Lab,” notes Chandler. “We’re trying to remind ourselves that the journey is important, that we learned important things along the way.”

Piecing together what Liam was lacking led to Daisy, a specialized machine capable of disassembling 200 iPhones an hour with precision that would make Swiss watchmakers cry. Each reclaimed screw and circuit is one less piece of material that needs to be mined, smelted, and shipped halfway across the globe.

The philosophy behind Apple’s environmental push isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about rewriting the narrative of what waste is. “You close one chapter and begin again,” Chandler reflects. “That’s life. It’s neither an ending nor a beginning, because it’s a circle. We’re trying to make the whole thing connected.”

What if, instead of trying to dominate nature, we copied it? Almost all industry, from fast fashion to automotives, is built on the linear economic model of take, make, dispose. Nature, on the other hand, operates with circularity—decomposing, reusing, and renewing over billions of years. Instead of viewing it as apart from us, we should recognize that it is us. In the hearts of forests, leaves decompose into rich soil, nourishing the roots that created them. Dead coral breaks down in shallow seas, forming limestone bases for new reefs. In the savannas, vultures dive for carcasses, cleaning the land of decay and completing the food chain. Nothing is wasted—every life feeds the next, a continuous cycle of renewal where refuse is both an ending and a beginning.

Apple’s environmental team is steering towards that rhythm—the ultimate goal being a fully closed-loop supply chain. Chandler hopes more people will embrace nature’s bent, bringing back old devices rather than letting them sit forgotten in drawers. By the end of 2025, Apple plans to use 100 percent recycled cobalt, gold, tin, and rare earth elements in key product components, and to remove plastic from all packaging. When customers trade in their old wares, they are setting the materials back into motion. Chandler sees this shift as fundamental: “Instead of talking about how we can make less of an impact, we [should] dream bigger.” She recalls, when Daisy was first put into action, standing before a bin of recovered speaker modules: “Look at all these magnets that we’re going to be able to use again,” she remembers thinking. “Until this moment, that didn’t happen.” It was tangible evidence of their vision.

The optimism here isn’t naïve. The engineers who build these systems joke that the best way to solve a problem is to tell them it’s impossible, and then leave them alone for a weekend. The stubborn insistence that circularity can work—that tech and nature needn’t be opposed—isn’t just utopian dreaming. It’s grounded in systems thinking, the same kinds of feedback loops that govern forests and coral reefs. “I think there’s pressure on us to have less in order to be on a healthy planet,” Chandler says. “I just don’t buy it.”

Humans remain future fiends. But maybe the fix is to recalibrate what “progress” actually means and looks like. Less linear sprints into resource depletion, more congruent dance with the ecosystems we can’t live without. After all, the future we’ve always dreamed of isn’t gone. It’s just asking us to look down at the soil beneath our feet.