What is inside a robot vacuum?

Materials in a robot vacuum

What a robot vacuum of this kind most likely holds. Amounts are given in words, not weights, because content depends on the design.

How a robot vacuum is recycled

The battery pack usually sits behind a small door on the underside and is taken out before the machine is processed; where it cannot be removed, the whole vacuum is handled as a device that contains a battery.² The cells are typically shredded once they have been discharged, which gives copper and aluminum foils, steel cans and a dark powder of cathode and anode material from which lithium, nickel, manganese and cobalt can be recovered.³ The rest is mostly plastic around small motors. After shredding, magnets pull out the steel motor cans, which carry their copper windings with them unless the motors were broken apart first, and the metal-rich fractions go on to a smelter that recovers the copper.⁴⁵⁶ The wheel and brush motors commonly use ferrite magnets, which hold no rare earths, so the only rare-earth magnet is typically the small ring in the fan motor. Recovering it means separating that motor from everything else, and whether that is done depends on the recycler.¹⁷ The main board, where the gold, silver and palladium are, typically joins other circuit boards on their way to a copper smelter.⁸

More on each stream: battery metals, magnet rare earths, copper.

Find it in the games and recycle it

• Mine the houseRobot vacuum (living room)
• Sort the device wallRobot vacuum (appliances)
• Find a recycling program near youCheck what the program accepts before you go.