A life-cycle assessment for eco-redesign of a consumer electronic product

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) regarding personal electronic products receives little attention, probably due to the fact that most of them are compact in size; hence, the environmental impact per unit is relatively lightweight. In this connection, howto perform eco-design for electronic products in practice with respect to all phases of their life cycle is unclear. However, taking their total (annual) consumption into consideration, the total impact cannot be underestimated. The main objective of this paper is to fill this gap by analysing a personal electronic product from the eco-design point of view. The results are presented in terms of different environmental aspects (like emissions to air) and associated suggestions for eco-redesign. More specifically, this paper aims to: (i) reveal a case study in which LCA is applied to an electronic product. The focus is on how to collect relevant data in this regard; (ii) summarise the results in terms of a variety of environmental impacts so that key items or key issues can be identified and quantified accordingly and (iii) suggest a set of associated eco-redesign options responding to the aforementioned issues. Improvement of the new design is then compared with the original design.