By Sustainability team
9th November 2011.
18:28
Tag Archives: LCA
Today Greenpeace released the 17th version of its Guide to Greener Electronics. In the guide they have ranked 15 manufacturers of personal computers, mobile phones and TVs according to the following categories; Energy and Climate, Greener Products and Sustainable Operations. Sony Ericsson was ranked 6th place, scoring 4.2 out of 10, placing us at the top amongst the Android™ smartphone players.
In this edition, Greenpeace has changed the scoring system, introduced tougher requirements and updated many criteria. New criteria were also added, raising the bar for the manufacturers. Overall, the new ranking has stronger focus on energy and climate issues. (more…)
I read an interesting article at Good about the difficulty of labeling also trying to educate on how to interpret labels. If it is difficult to understand a label on a “simple” product like skin lotion then how difficult would it not be to have it on a mobile phone?
We get the question why can you not have a label on the mobile phone for carbon footprint, or substances or why not Fairtrade. The complexity of electronic products and their supply chain makes it virtually impossible to have 100% control of the situation and status of all suppliers and their sub suppliers. To compare products based on a label without the possibility to provide full guarantees neither from the manufacturer nor from the one issuing the label creates great risks. The difficulty to get comparable data has been described on this blog before.
If we can get credible comparable data then we have the second question. What is most important energy or unwanted substances or is it the working conditions in the factory?
There are attempts to create labels for mobile phones and I hope the challenges will be possible to overcome. It is not easy to be a consumer but if we create more labels will it become easier or more difficult…..
We have got some questions related to how we secure data and improvement of environmental performance. We have many ways of tracking our perfomance and securing our products.
To conduct the LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) we work together with both parent companies, a large number of our suppliers and we also get information from Universities and institutions around the world. The LCA on the phone is based on several LCA’s from suppliers as well as acknowledged data on emissions and environmental impact from transports, raw materials extraction and energy production in different parts of the world. The basis and data input to this study is in fact extremely big.
Other than the LCA we also collect other environmental data for other purposes for example:
- Materials declarations are collected for all components covering all included materials.
- Before any product is launched analysis are conducted for different materials and assemblies at an external accredited lab to make sure we meet our requirements.
- We gather data from transport companies on fuel consumption, distances and emissions
- We measure emissions, waste generation or energy consumption at our factories and major sites pending location and size.
- We collect information on numbers and weights of products collected and recycled in our own collection systems.
LCA or Life Cycle Assessments are used to determine the environmental impact of products and services. The whole life cycle shall be taken into consideration and there are standards on how to do a LCA but even so different studies are not directly comparable without a great deal of insight. Selection of system boundries and assumptions influence results of the LCA. I have heard from a person doing LCA as a profession that “LCA is not a science it is an art” and I agree.
In a couple of places there has been comparisons between the C901 GreenHeart and competitor phones. In one article the C901 GreenHeart presented significantly lower CO2 footprint (which in this case definetly is true and flattering) the comparisons is however still not relevant. There are significant differencies in system boundries between these two studies. As soon as you start to present numbers people start to compare and this is one example of risk of presenting numbers from a LCA but at the same time these numbers are crucial for the scale and proportion of the environmental impact of the product.
Independent of the risks LCA is the ultimate tool to focus on right things in your strive to improve from sustainability point of view (environmental side of sustainability). Also bearing limitiations in mind LCA is also marvelous to compare different activities such mobile phone with a trip in your car or drinking water from the tap with water fron a bottle trnsported from far away.
Finally comparing results between two LCA conducted in same database with same scope and assumptions is also a very precise way of preseneting improvements in the way that we have been doing with the GreenHeart phone. Our LCA show that the total impact of a mobile phone is equal to 0.08% of the average person’s CO2, i.e., less than 0.1% of your personal CO2 impact (compared to global average person) comes from your mobile phone. This will be true independent of how your system boundires are selected. Note that in our study it includes materials extraction, production, transport, charging/usage, and waste handling of the phone and accessories inlcuded in the box.