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Abstract Consumer electronic products have a complex life cycle, characterized by environmental, social, and economic impacts and benefits associated with their manufacturing, use, and disposal at end-of-life. Accurately analysing these trade-offs and creating sustainable solutions requires data about the materials and components that make up these devices. Such information is rarely disclosed by manufacturers and only exists in the open literature in disparate case study format. This study presents a comprehensive database of bill of material (BOM) data describing the mass of major materials and components contained in 95 unique consumer electronic products. Data are generated by product disassembly and physical characterization and then validated against external benchmarks in the literature. The study also contributes a reproducible framework for organizing BOM data so that they can be expanded as new products enter the market. These data will benefit researchers studying all aspects of electronics and sustainability, including material scarcity, product design, environmental life cycle assessment, electronic waste policy, and environmental health and safety.
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Life cycle based alternatives assessment (LCAA) for chemical substitution
The world faces an increasing need to phase out harmful chemicals and design sustainable alternatives across various consumer products and industrial applications. Alternatives assessment is an emerging field with focus on identifying viable solutions to substitute harmful chemicals. However, current methods fail to consider trade-offs from human and ecosystem exposures, and from impacts associated with chemical supply chains and product life cycles. To close this gap, we propose a life cycle based alternatives assessment (LCAA) framework for consistently integrating quantitative exposure and life cycle impact performance in the substitution process. We start with a pre-screening based on function-related decision rules, followed by three progressive tiers from (1) rapid risk screening of various alternatives for the consumer use stage, to (2) an assessment of chemical supply chain impacts for selected alternatives with substantially different synthesis routes, and (3) an assessment of product life cycle impacts for alternatives with substantially different product life cycles. Each tier focuses on relevant impacts and uses streamlined assessment methods. While the initial risk screening will be sufficient for evaluating chemicals with similar supply chains, each additional tier helps further restricting the number of viable solutions, while avoiding unacceptable trade-offs. We test our LCAA framework in a proof-of-concept case study for identifying suitable alternatives to a harmful plasticizer in household flooring. Results show that the use stage dominates human health impacts across alternatives, supporting that a rapid risk screening is sufficient unless very different supply chains or a broader set of alternative materials or technologies are considered. Combined with currently used indicators for technical and economic performance, our LCAA framework is suitable for informing function-based substitution at the level of chemicals, materials and product applications to foster green and sustainable chemistry solutions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1743682
- PAR ID:
- 10214654
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Green Chemistry
- Volume:
- 22
- Issue:
- 18
- ISSN:
- 1463-9262
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 6008 to 6024
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1039/d0gc01544j
