Environmental performance of mobile products

Digitalization, miniaturization and integration are strong drivers for further development of products for mobile communication. As such these will generally lead to lower environmental loads per product. However, the strongly increasing number of products on the market will reverse this trend for the total sector. Examinations on telephones have been carried out jointly at Philips Consumer Electronics and at the Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration (IZM). The characteristic product parts, energy supply, display, encasing and electronic signal processing are subjected to an environmental assessment (including environmental assessment with Eco-Indicator and with the Toxic Potential Indicator IZM-TPI) and improvement potentials are shown for the selected products. The analysis shows that in mobile products, energy systems and the printed circuit boards are the key elements in further reduction of environmental loads. Both alternative substrates, lead free soldering and component selection (less hazardous substances) can contribute substantially towards this goal. These three topics are combined with further miniaturization, especially reduction of the board size, in the future. Approximately only half of the potential in this field has been implemented yet. As an overall result, it is concluded that the environmentally based load of present and future mobile products can be kept within limits if a swift implementation of EcoDesign (design for environment) is ensured.