The problem with products is not that they're made from materials like aluminum or silicon or glass but that these materials are combined in ways that make it very difficult to extract them from the finish product when recycling.
Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.
The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and are not easily reprocessed.
What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below 100% is not, by definition, sustainable.
If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost immediately recycled.
Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of years, there is much to be learned.
Interesting that you bring up Apple here considering the fact that it's latest products cannot be recycled due to design decisions (I.e., melding the glass display onto the frame)
A clean separation of materials is not required at the recycling facility, at least in theory, as most of the recycling methods being explored involve shredding the product up front and separating the resulting bits.
The recycling process becomes extremely complicated when the composition of the materials is non-uniform. The common worst offender in this regard is plastic bottles with several different types of plastic layered together. The opposite is a glass bottle with a metal cap.
Provided you can smash and pulverize a product into sufficiently fine pieces you can separate it by material.
Current recycling techniques cannot (supposedly) deal with this, but it's likely that new methods could be developed which could. Ideally, Apple's designers would actually work directly with recycling centers to develop a strategy for efficient recycling of their product. This could even be done later on, when the existing product is replaced with a new version.
Apple has gone a long way to making parts that are more "pure", where, for instance, the chassis of new computers is milled from a solid piece of metal that, once removed, can be shredded and reformed with no more difficulty than a drink can. The same goes, in principle, for the glass.
The plastics in most computers are made from an exotic blend of materials and are not easily reprocessed.
What we need more than cardboard computers is standards on how to manufacture products so they can be unmanufactured in the end and rebuilt into other things. The goal here is for 0% loss in the recovery cycle. Anything below 100% is not, by definition, sustainable.
If that sounds impossible, consider that the natural ecosystem in which we all live tends towards a 100% recycling rate. There are very few natural byproducts that do not have a recovery path. For instance, most trees produce enormous amounts of "garbage" in the form of leaves but these are almost immediately recycled.
Given that the natural world has been doing this for literally billions of years, there is much to be learned.
A great book on this subject is Cradle to Cradle (http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm) which proposes radically re-thinking our industrial cycle.