The only thing airpod getting recycled at your apple store is your conscience. You must genuinely not understand anything about recycling to believe you can salvage anything out of those tiny plastic shell earphones. Consider all the infrastructure and robots they had to build to recycle iphones. Trash airpods are trash.It’s only an ecological disaster if you personally throw them in a landfill. Return them to Apple for recycling if you care about the environment. I’ve never tossed an Apple device into the garbage, I donate it back to my local Apple store.