Why consumer tech needs to embrace the circular economy

The giants of con­sumer tech have pros­pered dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, with Apple and Sam­sung in par­tic­u­lar announc­ing yet more tri­umphant sales fig­ures. But anoth­er set of num­bers pro­vides an alto­geth­er more sober­ing read: the sec­tor gen­er­at­ed a record 53.6 mil­lion tonnes of elec­tron­ic waste in 2019 – up 21% on 2014’s total – accord­ing to research pub­lished last year by the Glob­al E‑Waste Sta­tis­tics Part­ner­ship.

E‑waste has become the world’s fastest-grow­ing domes­tic waste stream – a prob­lem that’s been com­pound­ed by increas­ing con­sump­tion, short­en­ing prod­uct lifes­pans and lim­it­ed repair options, as any­one who’s ever tried to get an old lap­top fixed will know only too well. Less than 20% of e‑waste is col­lect­ed and recy­cled, leav­ing the rest, much of which con­tains tox­ic chem­i­cals, des­tined for land­fill or incin­er­a­tion.

Enabling the circular economy in consumer tech

The envi­ron­men­tal impact of e‑waste stretch­es far beyond the tox­i­c­i­ty of its com­po­nents. “Dur­ing 2020, more than 100 bil­lion tonnes of raw mate­ri­als were extract­ed from the earth – the most ever,” says Otto De Bont, CEO of Renewi, a waste-man­age­ment com­pa­ny oper­at­ing main­ly in the UK and Benelux. 

The first goal of Renewi’s five-year sus­tain­abil­i­ty strat­e­gy is to “enable the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my”. To this end, De Bont explains that there needs to be a dra­mat­ic improve­ment in the recov­ery of pre­vi­ous­ly used mate­r­i­al, such that far more of this can be con­vert­ed into sec­ondary raw mate­r­i­al for new prod­ucts. He points to recent research pub­lished by a Dutch social enter­prise called Cir­cle Econ­o­my.

“Accord­ing to its Cir­cu­lar­i­ty Gap Report 2021, if the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my were to be enact­ed glob­al­ly, it would be pos­si­ble to close the emis­sions gap and slow glob­al warm­ing. Today the world is 8.6% ‘cir­cu­lar’. But, if gov­ern­ments, indus­try and oth­er key play­ers were to embrace the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my and recy­cling, as opposed to allow­ing the incin­er­a­tion or dis­pos­al of used mate­r­i­al into land­fill, they could push the fig­ure up to 17% by 2032.”

But get­ting the con­sumer tech indus­try to coop­er­ate in such an effort will be no easy task. So says Chris­t­ian Rudolph, a part­ner at co:dify Group, a Berlin-based inno­va­tion con­sul­tan­cy whose clients include Philips and Fair­phone. 

“The cir­cu­lar econ­o­my needs a high lev­el of trans­paren­cy in the sup­ply chain, but tech com­pa­nies aren’t always ful­ly aware of what’s hap­pen­ing through­out their sup­ply chains,” he says. “Any­thing that occurs in their own plants is quite trans­par­ent but it’s far less so when you’re talk­ing about a sup­pli­er of a sup­pli­er. An aver­age mobile phone com­pris­es 250 mate­ri­als, so it’s sim­ply not viable for those com­pa­nies to dig that deep into their sup­ply chains.”

Rudolph adds that their sup­ply chains rarely fea­ture the logis­ti­cal sys­tems that would facil­i­tate the reuse of mate­ri­als. “When you aren’t plan­ning these into your designs, you real­ly decrease the prob­a­bil­i­ty that your prod­uct will be recy­cled,” he says.

Accord­ing to Rudolph, con­sumer tech man­u­fac­tur­ers need to think more about “pre­cy­cling”. This means tak­ing recy­cling require­ments into account at the design stage and embrac­ing key cir­cu­lar-econ­o­my con­cepts, such as reduc­ing the num­ber of mate­ri­als in their prod­ucts to make these eas­i­er to recy­cle.

Circularity and smartphones

Rudolph acknowl­edges that some con­sumer tech firms are start­ing to take cir­cu­lar­i­ty more seri­ous­ly, although that’s not because they’re wor­ried about the PR risks posed by their con­tri­bu­tion to the e‑waste moun­tain. 

“The impact of cus­tomer scruti­ny is lim­it­ed,” he says. “If we look at recent scan­dals in the tech indus­try, they have a very short shelf life – every­thing tends to return to nor­mal after a cou­ple of weeks.”

They are more con­cerned about the price volatil­i­ty of raw mate­ri­als and want to mit­i­gate that risk, accord­ing to Rudolph, but so far they are only touch­ing on “the out­er rings of the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my. In essence, they are build­ing their phones as they always did, but now they have buy-back sys­tems in place, so that you can return your old hand­set for scrap. Yet they’re not using those mate­ri­als to pro­duce new phones.”

One mobile phone pro­duc­er that’s way ahead of the pack in the cir­cu­lar­i­ty stakes is Fair­phone, a social enter­prise estab­lished in Ams­ter­dam in 2013 to make hand­sets with a low­er envi­ron­men­tal impact.  

A cer­ti­fied B Cor­po­ra­tion, Fair­phone is also on a mis­sion to ensure fair con­di­tions for those work­ing through­out its sup­ply chain, as uneth­i­cal employ­ment prac­tices are par­tic­u­lar­ly com­mon in the min­er­al extrac­tion sec­tor. The com­pa­ny has cre­at­ed a mod­u­lar, repairable phone, where parts such as the bat­tery can be eas­i­ly replaced. It has not all been plain sail­ing for the com­pa­ny. It strug­gled when nego­ti­at­ing deals with mobile oper­a­tors, while its first two mod­els were sig­nif­i­cant­ly more cost­ly than their main­stream equiv­a­lents. But in August 2019 Wired deemed the Fair­phone 3+, which is made from 40% recy­cled plas­tic and avail­able on Vodafone’s net­work in the UK, a poten­tial “break­through prod­uct”.

Rudolph thinks that it would help Fair­phone to think first and fore­most about mak­ing a great prod­uct. “It can be cir­cu­lar on the back end, but on the front end it needs to look very com­pelling to the con­sumer. Its qual­i­ty should be at least com­pa­ra­ble, but maybe even supe­ri­or, to that of lin­ear prod­ucts.”

Even if Fair­phone can’t yet com­pete on quite the same lev­el as the smart­phone giants, it is play­ing an impor­tant role by show­ing what lev­el of sus­tain­abil­i­ty can be achieved in its indus­try, there­by prompt­ing con­ver­sa­tions about cir­cu­lar­i­ty among busi­ness­es and con­sumers.

The need for regulation

For De Bont, whose com­pa­ny pro­vides recy­cled plas­tics through its Cool­rec sub­sidiary, the only way to prompt con­sumer tech firms to adopt a cir­cu­lar approach is legal com­pul­sion. 

“Although con­sumers are open to send­ing their e‑waste for recy­cling, man­u­fac­tur­ers are less inclined to draw on that mate­r­i­al when mak­ing new prod­ucts,” he argues. “To ensure that elec­tron­ic goods are cre­at­ed using a mix of pri­ma­ry raw mate­ri­als and sec­ondary mate­ri­als, it is impor­tant for gov­ern­ments to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion requir­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers to do so. Gov­ern­ments also need to help align the prices of high-spec sec­ondary raw mate­ri­als with those of pri­ma­ry raw mate­ri­als. The time has come for pro­duc­ers to move towards recy­cling as the start­ing point of the devel­op­ment process of new prod­ucts. Cur­rent­ly, it’s the final stage mak­ing the e‑technology more dif­fi­cult to process.” 

De Bont con­tin­ues: “The Euro­pean Par­lia­ment has intro­duced leg­is­la­tion across the EU, but mem­ber states’ gov­ern­ments can inter­pret this indi­vid­u­al­ly, mak­ing the ‘end of waste cri­te­ria’ dif­fer­ent from coun­try to coun­try. Con­sis­ten­cy in reg­u­la­tion is required if we’re to move towards the cir­cu­lar econ­o­my.”