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Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering of an Integrated Desktop PC; A SME Perspective

Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering of an Integrated Desktop PC; A SME Perspective. By David McNamara 31-Oct-2013. Reasons for Report. ICT products are full of environmental and sustainability issues. (conflict minerals, power consumption, recycling).

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Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering of an Integrated Desktop PC; A SME Perspective

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  1. Sustainable Life Cycle Engineering of an Integrated Desktop PC; A SME Perspective By David McNamara 31-Oct-2013

  2. Reasons for Report • ICT products are full of environmental and sustainability issues. (conflict minerals, power consumption, recycling). • To engineer the lifecycle by using an environmentally friendly approach to the design. • Backed up by an environmentally friendly PC.

  3. SME (Small to Medium Enterprise) • SME has no control over the selection materials for manufacture. • They can only choose off-the-shelf specifications. • Because of this they need to choose best available components such as: • Low energy consumption. • Reduced toxicity • Facilitate component exchange. • Choose to manufacture casing themselves

  4. A SME Life Cycle Perspective

  5. Key Findings 5 Decision Points during SME use phase in relation to above graph: • What the user should do when finished with product? • Life extension, stay with user longer. • Add emotional element to design. • What should a collection facility do? • Refurbishment. • PC needs to be easy to disassemble. • If recycled, should PC be dismantled manually or mechanically? • Manually dismantled will achieve better recovery rates. • Depends on labour costs

  6. Key Findings Cont.. • If exported as waste can it be manually dismantled and returned for final treatment? • If incentives are accurate, then informal sector can be engaged to trade. • Again ease of disassembly needed. • Once dismantled can downstream markets be found for all materials? • Plastic casings have no downstream market • If needed to be stored for long periods, informal trading could commence.

  7. Key Findings Cont.. Case Study

  8. Disassembly • Complete disassembly allowed the complete separation of the system into its separate parts. • The process took 3 min and 39 seconds with only a Phillips head screwdriver

  9. Conclusions • Life cycle of electronic equipment can be very complex given global reach of products. • The SME cannot engineer the life cycle to achieve the best environmental outcome. • However the SME can help by choosing only the most environmentally friendly systems possible. • This would make manufacturers think twice about producing poor environmentally friendly products if there is no market for them.

  10. Questions?

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