One number from a 100-page report, held up to the light — and then held next to everyone else’s. This page is a reading, not a verdict. It shows the number, the numbers around it, and the questions the number can’t answer on its own.
“30 percent of the materials we shipped in Apple products, by weight, came from recycled or renewable sources in 2025.”
By weight is the honest unit. It means aluminium enclosures, steel, glass, cobalt and rare earths — the heavy, extractive part of a phone — not a headline about a plastic tray. It also means the remaining 70 percent is still coming out of the ground. That is the whole story in one sentence: a genuinely hard number, and a very long way to go.
Solid bar: reported today. Pale bar: the stated goal. The scale is 0–100% of the material base each company defines for itself — and that definition is exactly where the comparison breaks down.
30% of shipped material by weight in 2025; long-stated ambition of only recycled and renewable materials in products and packaging.
All products from renewable or recycled materials by 2030 — a wood-and-textile base, far easier to close than a metals-and-silicon one.
Half of all product content from recycled or renewable material by 2030, measured across the portfolio.
Recycled resin in half of all plastic parts by 2030, and effectively all of them by 2050 — a plastics target, not a whole-device one.
“Secondary first”: raise secondary material share toward 50%, from roughly 30% today. A car is heavy, and heavy is where circularity pays.
30% post-consumer recycled plastic across the personal-systems and print portfolio.
A quarter of plastics in new cars recycled or bio-based — narrow scope, but among the first hard numbers in the sector.
All figures as published by each company in its own reporting. The horizons differ, and so do the denominators: Apple counts by shipped weight, Samsung and HP by plastic parts, BMW by secondary material share, Dell by product content. Weight, parts count and procurement spend produce wildly different percentages from the same factory. Treat this chart as a map of ambition, not a league table.
The circularity story and the climate story have started to move in opposite directions. Device materials are being closed loop by loop; meanwhile the compute behind those devices is opening a new hole in the ground.
Google’s reported emissions against its 2019 base year, driven by data-centre build-out — while its 2030 net-zero target stands.
Google Environmental ReportProjected global data-centre electricity use by 2030, roughly double the ~415 TWh of 2024. About Japan’s entire consumption.
IEA, Energy and AIOf the 62 million tonnes of e-waste generated in 2022, the share formally collected and recycled. The rest is the feedstock we lose.
Global E-waste Monitor 2024How circular the world economy actually is — down from 9.1% five years earlier, because we extract new material faster than we cycle old.
Circularity Gap ReportRead together: a single company can raise recycled content to 30% by weight and still sit inside an industry whose absolute material and energy throughput is climbing. Corporate intensity metrics improve. Planetary totals do not, yet.
Recycled aluminium needs a small fraction of the energy of primary smelting, which is why enclosures and frames were the first to flip. Cobalt, lithium and rare earths are following, pulled by both price and export risk.
Chips, glass laminates and adhesives are the stubborn remainder — low mass, high impact, and nearly impossible to separate cleanly. Expect percentage-by-weight figures to keep rising while the hardest grams stay primary.
Tech firms spent a decade proving growth could decouple from emissions, largely by buying clean electricity. Generative AI has reversed the slope for several of them in a single reporting cycle.
The next credible claim is not “100% renewable” but hourly, local carbon-free supply — plus the embodied carbon of the servers themselves, which is where materials reporting and energy reporting finally meet.
Ecodesign rules, recycled-content minimums, repairability scores, end-of-life vehicle requirements and product passports turn self-set pledges into audited thresholds with penalties attached.
That changes who moves. A leader’s 30% becomes a floor for the whole market — and the interesting question stops being “who promises most” and becomes “whose numbers survive an audit”.
Only the document the sender shared carries a live link here. Everything else is named precisely — publisher, title, edition — so you can pull the primary source yourself. An open station doesn’t pass off second-hand links as evidence. Figures are as published by each organisation and rounded; if you find a number here that has moved, that correction belongs on this page.