Life cycle thinking and assessment tools on environmentally-benign electronics: Convergent optimization of materials use, end-of-life strategy and environmental policies

The purpose of this study is to integrate the quantitative environmental performance assessment tools and the theory of multi-objective optimization within the boundary of electronic product systems to support the selection among design alternatives in terms of environmental impact, technical criteria, and economic feasibility. To meet with the requirements that result from emerging environmental legislation targeting electronics products, the research addresses an important analytical methodological approach to facilitate environmentally conscious design and end-of-life management with a life cycle viewpoint. A synthesis of diverse assessment tools is applied on a set of case studies: lead-free solder materials selection, cellular phone design, and desktop display technology assessment. In the first part of this work, an in-depth industrial survey of the status and concerns of the U.S. electronics industry on the elimination of lead (Pb) in solders is described. The results show that the trade-offs among environmental consequences, technology challenges, business risks, legislative compliance and stakeholders' preferences must be explicitly, simultaneously, and systematically addressed in the decision-making process used to guide multi-faceted planning of environmental solutions. In the second part of this work, the convergent optimization of the technical cycle, economic cycle and environmental cycle is addressed in a coherent and systematic way using the application of environmentally conscious design of cellular phones. The technical understanding of product structure, components analysis, and materials flow facilitates the development of "Design for Disassembly" guidelines. A bottom-up disassembly analysis on a "bill of materials" based structure at a micro-operational level is utilized to select optimal end-of-life strategies on the basis of economic feasibility. A macro-operational level life cycle model is used to investigate the environmental consequences linking environmental impact with the cellular phone production activities focusing on the upstream manufacturing and end-of-life life cycle stages. The last part of this work, the quantitative elicitation of weighting factors facilitates the comparison of trade-offs in the context of a multi-attribute problem. An integrated analytical approach, Integrated Industrial Ecology Function Deployment (I2-EFD), is proposed to assess alternatives at the design phase of a product system and is validated with the assessment of desktop display technologies and lead-free solder alternatives.