Life cycle assessment (LCA) of circular consumer electronics based on IC recycling and emerging PCB assembly materials.

As consumer microelectronics become ever more ubiquitous, there are growing concerns about their environmental impact. However, the diversity of designs and components used in modern devices makes a coherent mitigation strategy hard to formulate. In this work, we perform a quantitative life cycle assessment (LCA) of the environmental profiles of both high-value (a smartwatch) and low-value (a TV remote) devices and find that the optimal mitigation strategy varies substantially between these two extremes.