Apple’s re-cycling program has always been corporate green-washing. It’s far greener to make the maximum possible use of your very resource intensive products. That would eat into Apple’s profits however, so they go out of their way to make it as difficult as possible.
Re-use beats re-cycling every time: Next time Apple crows about their “Green” recycling program ask how many of those devices are put back into use.
I grew up replacing all my devices every three, four years because whatever you bought after three years it was ancient.
My current laptop is six and a half years old (T440s bought on the day it became available) and is still very competent machine (after I hacked it to support LTE). I will probably replace it in a year or two and I can imagine this could be given away to somebody with need and it could be used productively for many years to come. With 4 cores, 12GB of RAM and 500GB SSD not many people will find it lacking as a work laptop (with built in graphics it was never meant for gaming or graphics work).
Now, I think this is way more green than any recycling program. The laptop is built to last and in perfect condition.
Their laptops have the highest resale values and their iOS devices have far far longer lifespans than their Android equivalents, I think it's hard to fault them on this
Some people do care about sustainable and environmentally friendly practices though.