What Will It Take to Create a Circular Economy for Electronics?

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): In today’s electronics landscape, engineers find themselves on the front lines of the push to design products for a circular economy. With up to 80% of a product's environmental impact determined in the design phase, they’re shaping not only how long it can last before it must be replaced, but also its potential to be repaired and recycled. Their decisions can prevent the piling up of vast amounts of electronic waste the world over.

While the electronics industry is under pressure from consumers and regulators to be more sustainable, it continues to grapple with its environmental footprint. The challenge lies in the nature of mass production, which remains fundamentally unsustainable. For the most part, electronic products and components inside them rely on resource-hungry processes and global supply chains that run counter to the core principles of a circular economy. Is a product sustainable if it’s designed for obsolescence within a couple of years?

But many of the movers and shakers in the electronics industry are buying into the concept of the circular economy. Several tech giants and global companies are working together under The Circular Electronics Partnership (CEP) to address challenges related to repairing electronics, replacing obsolete components, upgrading the hardware and sotware, reusing components in other products, and recycling what remains. The roster includes Amazon, Dell, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Jabil, Lenovo, and Microsoft, among others.

The CEP released the Circular Electronics Design Guide to give electronics firms and engineers a blueprint to integrate the concepts of the circular economy into their designs. To learn more about it, Electronic Design reached out to Teun van Wetten, Design Director and Head of Sustainability at Accenture Industry X, which worked with more than 60 industry experts to compile the 600-page report. It’s free to download.

 Courtesy: www.electronicdesign.com