Innovating circular tech

Technological innovations are revolutionizing device efficiency and offering huge benefits to quality of life for people around the globe, with increasingly personalized technologies addressing new and evolving consumer needs.

Within this ecosystem, manufacturers play a crucial role.

By virtue of their industry positioning, consumer technology manufacturers have a deep understanding of consumer preferences, product life cycles and the overall impact of technologies on society.

One emerging trend is a focus on sustainability throughout a product’s life cycle. Responding to consumer and societal demands, product designers and manufacturers are working to reduce emissions, electronic waste and materials of concern. Our contribution to a circular economy is maximizing reuse in hopes the extraction of nonrenewable resources can be minimized and then, ideally, completely displaced.

In pursuing this goal, the technology industry follows the “three Rs,” a hierarchy created by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the 1980s: reduce, reuse and recycle. From a product design and manufacturing perspective, each of these three strategies presents opportunities for innovation. Like a Venn diagram, these strategies can at times overlap, and each has its own set of challenges and incentives around environmental impact and financial costs to manufacturers, recyclers and consumers.

Reduce

Despite a growing number of devices owned by Americans, e-scrap has decreased since peaking about a decade ago.

In fact, according to the EPA’s most recent Advancing Sustainable Materials Management report, consumer electronics is the fastest declining product category in the municipal waste stream. That EPA data has been corroborated by academic research from the Rochester Institute of Technology and Yale University, funded in part by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), Arlington, Virginia.

E-scrap is declining because electronics manufacturers, enabled by technological innovations focused on energy efficiency, are designing products with fewer and lighter materials, thus maximizing material efficiency. Materials used in consumer technology products have a smaller environmental footprint beyond a decrease in weight as manufacturers make products with more durable materials and components that extend product life. This offers economic and sustainability benefits by reducing how many products reach end-of-life each year.

An example is old cathode ray tube technology, which for decades was the best available video display technology but required heavy leaded glass to protect viewers from harmful X-rays. It has been replaced, first by LCD and now LED and OLED technology, all of which produce better and lighter displays without using a major material of concern. This means lead is no longer mined to make new TVs and monitors and less lead is disposed at the products’ end of life.

Innovation is a hallmark of our industry, and continuous improvement in materials used in products dramatically has reduced the technology industry’s current and projected future environmental footprint.

Reuse

Cellphones are an excellent example of consumer technology reuse. Cellular devices are among the top five most purchased devices in the industry, and purchases often are driven by excitement around new features or capabilities, meaning consumers often retire functional phones.

Manufacturers, retailers and many other companies have tapped into a strong resale market, catering to consumers who are interested in new cellphone technologies and top brands but don’t want to pay full retail price.

As a result, cellphone durability has become a valuable asset. Along with reparability, manufacturers are focusing on durability to extend the lives of cellphones—and a growing range of other products—which enables additional reuse by secondary and tertiary users.

Because it recognizes the value of a thriving resale market as an element of sustainable technology consumption, CTA now supports “right to repair” legislation in the United States. While the legislation has taken various forms and been enacted in three states—California, New York and Minnesota—CTA’s suggested legislative model is based on manufacturers treating independent repair providers the same as manufacturer-authorized service providers to increase consumer choice and repair options.

Although the legislative battles in the U.S. have been driven by who performs the repair, the long-term sustainability impact on average device life spans and the value of used devices in the secondary market largely will depend on the quality of the repair and the replacement parts and components. But the goal is clear: more and longer-term reuse of devices.

Recycle

The next best strategy in the EPA hierarchy is recycling. In the U.S., most consumer device recycling is financed in whole or in part by device manufacturers, with more than 5 million pounds of e-scrap recycled via manufacturer-funded recycling programs since 2011.

Commitments by manufacturers to use postconsumer recycled materials coupled with investments in mixed plastics separation and recovery technologies also continue to show promise, even as challenges in the transboundary movement of e-scrap loom large.

Opportunities for innovation remain, too. The trend toward lighter, more integrated components that often use fewer valuable materials continues to affect recycling markets, pushing recyclers to move up the waste management hierarchy to explore more reuse and resale opportunities for used devices and their components.

Consumer Technology Circularity Initiative

In January, CTA launched the Consumer Technology Circularity Initiative (CTCI), a voluntary industry initiative to reduce e-scrap and to support industry sustainability efforts across product life cycles. The initiative aims to encourage more reuse, enhance recycling, reduce climate impact and, ultimately, see less global waste from consumer electronics.

CTCI will highlight industry innovations across the life cycle of consumer technology products with participants from companies including Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Samsung and Sony Electronics Inc.

In addition to highlighting achievements around e-scrap collection and recycling, CTCI will focus on climate impacts and product and process innovations for repair, reuse and recycled content, expanding on the EPA’s hierarchy.

CTCI founding companies are committed to innovative solutions to reduce the environmental impacts of materials used in consumer tech products and associated climate impacts to help the circular economy become a reality:

• Lenovo, with U.S. headquarters in Morrisville, North Carolina, is transitioning to a circular economy through innovations in its supply chain, product design and services. It is integrating closed-loop recycled plastic holistically into a range of products rather than a single product.
• LG Electronics, based in South Korea, is pursuing several major circularity initiatives as part of its broader sustainability strategy. For example, the company is expanding the use of recycled plastic in 19 product categories and has set a target to use a cumulative 600,000 tons of recycled plastic in products by 2030.
• Panasonic, based in Japan, recently issued a new groupwide circular economy policy that focuses on several key circularity principles, such as maximizing product lifetime, minimizing the use of materials and extending the use of recycled and renewable materials.
• South Korea-based Samsung sees resource circularity as being essential to its overall sustainability vision and a lens for innovation. In the U.S., Samsung collects an average of 100 million pounds of consumer e-scrap per year—10 percent of what it recycles globally. In addition to reusing metals and glass, more than 14 percent of all plastics used is from recycled materials, and the company is aiming to apply recycled resin to 50 percent of its products’ plastic parts by 2030 and to all plastic parts by 2050.
• Japan-based Sony Electronics Inc., under its Road to Zero environmental plan, is on its way to eliminating plastic packaging from newly designed small products using alternative methods such as paper- and plant-based materials by the end of the 2024 fiscal year.

Companies across the technology industry have made significant strides toward implementing policies and practices that support the circular economy– prioritizing reuse and repurposing of materials to reduce waste. Future generations depend on our collective work to find more innovative methods to reduce, reuse and recycle, while consumer technology helps solve some of the world’s most pressing problems like affordable health care and climate solutions.

The Consumer Technology Association, based in Arlington, Virginia, represents the U.S. consumer technology industry. More information can be found here.