An Ecological Framework to Assess Sustainability Impacts for an Evolving Consumer Electronic Product System

Consumer electronics have revolutionized the manner in which we work, read, and entertain ourselves. However, this transformation comes at a high cost, with significant energy input and emissions releases across all stages of the electronic product life cycle. The limited success of per product efficiency improvements, often formulated in the field of industrial ecology, does not address the electronic product system as a whole because escalating consumption may actually offset any individual impact reductions. Additionally, existing industrial ecology models fail to effectively capture energy, material, and waste flows associated with real consumption patterns, as consumers purchase, use, and discard a group of interrelated devices such as desktops, laptops, printers, mobile phones, and digital cameras. To address this challenge, this dissertation develops and applies novel industrial ecology methodologies to more effectively characterize changes to rapidly evolving and interrelated product systems. Notably, these approaches borrow heavily from underutilized biological ecology concepts from community ecology and optimal foraging theory, but adapted for use as applied to a complex product system like consumer electronics. These approaches can lead to more effective design, production, green purchasing decisions, and end of life practices and policies, while at the same time expand industrial ecology\u27s traditional focus on the ecosystem metaphor and ‘per product’ approaches and strengthen its connection to the source science: biological ecological roots