A life cycle inventory analysis of cellular phones

Recently cellular phones are spreading so quickly and becoming one of the basic tools for IT society. Because of this, the life cycle inventory analysis for their production process is becoming increasingly important. Here inventory analysis is made for the parts of a cellular phone, and the energy for assembling and manufacturing them is measured in order to estimate CO/sub 2/ emission. The results show that the greatest part of the environmental load of cellular phone production is occupied by production of electronics parts, such as wiring board, liquid crystal display and so forth, while production of the machinery parts and assembling of the whole cellular phone occupies a small part. The production process consumes many times more energy than that needed for material production. However, a higher ratio is observed in the case of finer and more integrated devices. The device forming process requires a clean environment and should be performed in a clean room, which consumes high power and thereby occupies a large part of the environmental load of electronic device production.