Grist:

When Apple destroys your old device, plenty of perfectly functional computer processing chips and cameras that could live on — whether in refurbished phones, toy pianos, hobby drones, or smart appliances — get melted down. Screens that could have replaced cracked ones, lending a few years of life to an older phone, are pulverized, and the trace amounts of the minerals that make them work are lost as so much dust.

What’s more, all the energy that went into mining, refining, manufacturing, shipping, and assembling those materials evaporates.

The article makes an interesting point that many of us, even if we do recycle, recycle too quickly.