Clearing Hurdles to Electronics Circularity

By Kelly Scanlon, IPC lead sustainability strategist

On September 25, Anthesis Group, EarthShift Global, and IPC co-hosted a discussion with systems engineers and life cycle assessors on data challenges for circularizing electronics. We met at the annual American Center for Life Cycle Assessment (ACLCA) conference. The 90-minute session “There’s No End to a Circle…” covered several perspectives on electronics circularity challenges that stem from the lack of reliable, current, and secure industry data.

Since May 2024, IPC has engaged with stakeholders, including many electronics manufacturing industry members, on circularity for electronics. We held a webinar, “Enhancing Circularity: Opportunities for IC and Other Component Reuse,” in May with EarthShift Global, a four-hour workshop in June on circularity at the Electronics Goes Green conference in Berlin with iNEMI, webinars in July and August with several partners including iNEMI, imec, and ACLCA, and we are planning another in-person event at the eSummit in Austin at the end of October.

Collectively, IPC, Anthesis, EarthShift Global, and iNEMI have engaged with hundreds of industry stakeholders during these recent events regarding circularity challenges and issues for the electronics industry. We understand the greatest of these challenges include the lack of data, the lack of a clear definition or description of what circularity means for the electronics manufacturing value chain, the lack of economic incentives to circularize, and the lack of workforce awareness about circularity topics and related policy and technology drivers.

We hear from electronics industry members that the lack of data needed for disclosures, reporting obligations, and data exchange with suppliers and customers is of considerable concern. This lack stems from the complex electronics products manufactured using various processes by multiple tiers of suppliers and customers across many geographic regions operating with business-sensitive or proprietary information. The complexity of final products includes assembled printed circuit boards, the electronic components within them, the integrated circuits (ICs) mounted on the boards, and the materials essential for the ICs.

Electronics companies may be interested in life cycle assessment, circularity, and measuring product carbon footprint. Still, they must rely on suppliers to provide useable manufacturing data, operating data, and information about end-of-life options.

To address these data challenges, we want to understand the types of data needed by diverse electronics industry stakeholders, the availability of existing solutions to address these data needs, and ideas for new solutions that can address barriers to data generation and data gathering applicable to the circularization of electronics. During the 90-minute session at ACLCA, we hosted three break-out groups of approximately 10 participants each. We asked them to help identify existing solutions and ideas for new ones, and this is what they said is needed.

• Standards for products data sheets that support digital product passports and reporting disclosure obligations.
• Increased visibility into the mass or materials in a given product.
• Emissions data shared between users of a product to enhance allocation of emissions and incentivize reuse.
• Improved data security assurances or make it easier to delete or erase data to address a major barrier to returning electronics.
• Address software and security update cadence to ensure they do not thwart the electronics’ life.
• Design for circularity and shift practice of design for obsolescence to design with end in mind (or reuse, repair, refurbishment) in mind.
• Refurbishing centers to resell products and devices, establish a marketplace to find recoverers, and buy and sell recovered electronics (e.g., chips, boards).
• Incorporate the variations in business models for the global north and south (e.g., more costly to refurbish and reuse in the north versus south).
• Utilize software to optimize energy efficiency; software dictates to the ICs what is needed and therefore can be used to capture information about use.
• Use telemetry to collect and transmit data to a repository to analyze and monitor operations.
• Describe and document uncertainty in the industry data available for use in models, and identify the difference between data for coarse versus detailed models.

We welcome other industry members and stakeholders to participate in this ongoing conversation about solutions that help us clear the hurdles to circularity for electronics. This is a big topic that has many aspects, but we can work to define a specific problem and right-sized solution, whether as a new tool, database, industry standard, workforce education and training, or advocacy with policymakers.

What challenges do you see related to electronics' circularity? We want to hear your ideas. We are convening working groups and welcome your participation in identifying solutions and helping to create and implement them.

Contact Kelly Scanlon, IPC’s lead sustainability strategist to get involved.

Special thanks to Callan Glover and Caroline Gaudreault, life cycle assessment experts from Anthesis Group, and Lise Laurin, CEO of EarthShift Global for their collaboration and support of the session at ACLCA and continued partnership on advancing circularity for electronics industry members.