Apple: Liam

Credits & Description:

Title: Liam
Agency: Apple
Brand: Apple
Country: USA
Entrant Company: Apple, Cupertino
Advertising Agency: Apple, Cupertino
Design, Film And Video Production: Apple (Apple)
Execution:
The system has two ways of removing components: end-of-arm-tooling such as a drill bit, suction cup, or fixed tip interacting with a stationary iPhone, and direct robot handling of iPhone to interact with external active tooling while performing complex, coordinated movements. The tooling on the robotic arms and external tool fixtures are all custom developed for the Liam line. Liam removes the following components from the iPhone 6: coverglass assembly, battery, main logic board, receiver, speaker, alert module, rear facing camera, and housing.
Relevancy:
Our R&D project, Liam, is an example of what happens when Apple applies the same innovation to taking products apart as we do to designing them. Electronics have a lot of diverse materials, but the recycling industry relies on outdated techniques, like shredding, that are made for older, less complex products.Existing processes can’t recover materials with the purity we need.So we invented Liam, a line of robots that can disassemble iPhone 6, sort its components, and reduce the need to mine new resources. Liam makes the idea of a circular economy—where we're reusing and replenishing resources— closer to reality.
Synopsis:
Traditional e-waste recycling can only recover a handful of the materials used in today’s electronics. That’s because the common practice of shredding these highly complex electronics results in their materials being mixed together into heterogeneous waste streams, so the individual materials are harder to recover and reuse. By disassembling iPhone 6, Liam creates eight different material streams that can be sent for targeted material recovery. This makes it possible to recover more pure material from Apple products at the end of their life.
Campaign Description:
Liam’s goal is to improve material recovery from Apple products. We explored automation and robotics because of their potential to meticulously “de-manufacture” an electronic device. By using automation, individual components can be removed from a device and separated, instead of shredding and mixing all the material together.The biggest engineering challenge was that many of the phones Liam disassembles are beyond repair so they have a variety of damage. This creates a lot of variability from phone to phone, which is extremely challenging to a repeatable robotic process. We created custom hardware and software to combat these variables. Liam’s 29 robotic arms, software, tools, and the conveyer belt that moves phones between each arm are unique. Once a component is removed, it falls into isolated bins for specialty material recycling.
Outcome:
There are currently two Liam systems—one in the United States and another in the Netherlands. Every 11 seconds an iPhone is disassembled into 8 discrete components, with each line capable of disassembling 1.2 million iPhone 6 units per year. The Liam system is comprised of 29 robots in 21 cells with dual-robots used in certain cells with particularly high cycle times. Our goal is to create a closed loop of materials. For example, we took the aluminum enclosures Liam recovered from iPhone 6, melted them and reused the material to create Mac mini computers we use in our iPhone final assembly facilities. Liam was introduced to the world at an Apple event in March of 2016. After his introduction, Siri was asked about Liam over 130,000 times. The Liam YouTube video has been viewed over 2.9 million times.