Purpose

Repairing, refurbishing and remanufacturing are three strategies of the Circular Economy (CE), aiming at closing product cycles and maintaining materials and resources in the product cycle as long as possible. This paper analyses the environmental impacts of these three circular end-of-use scenarios (repairing, refurbishing and part remanufacturing) when performed on a common, “non-circular” smartphone. The underlying data used for this paper partly have been result of the Horizon 2020 project sustainablySMART, where circular product concepts have been developed and analysed in detail.

Methods

To analyse the environmental impacts of different circular end-of-use scenarios of smartphones, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is performed. For considering the impact of a smartphone’s first life (e.g. materials, production), an economic allocation is used.

Since the goal of the study was to better understand the environmental impacts of processing routes that enable multiple life cycles of a product, allocation according to the economic value is applied instead of applying system expansion. As system expansion provides just an aggregated view of the first and second product life cycles and no decision support at the end of the first life regarding the relevant CE strategy can be given. The economic allocation is based on the ratio between the residual market value and the original price from the scenario’s input stream of smartphones of the respective end-of-use scenario.

To reach comparability of the results, a second-use-time-parameter is defined for each scenario. This parameter takes into account that the second use time reaches only a certain share from the average smart phone use time.

Results

This study shows that through all three circular strategies, a reduction in the investigated impact categories—Global Warming Potential (GWP) and Abiotic Depletion Potential (ADP)—can be achieved.

Conclusions

The analysed end-of-use scenarios repairing and refurbishing show the highest potential for smartphones in terms of Circular Economy, as most of the environmental impacts can be allocated to the device production, and the impact of additional steps to perform CE-strategies (e.g. collection of discarded phones, refurbishing) is rather low.

中文翻译：

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智能手机的不同循环使用场景的建模

目的

维修，翻新和再制造是循环经济（CE）的三种策略，旨在关闭产品周期并尽可能长地维护产品周期中的材料和资源。本文分析了在普通的“非圆形”智能手机上执行时，这三种循环使用终端场景（维修，翻新和零件再制造）对环境的影响。本文使用的基础数据部分是来自Horizo​​n 2020项目sustainableSMART的结果，该项目已开发并详细分析了圆形产品的概念。

方法

为了分析智能手机的不同循环最终使用场景的环境影响，执行了生命周期评估（LCA）。为了考虑智能手机的首次使用（例如材料，生产）的影响，使用了经济分配。

由于研究的目的是更好地理解使产品具有多个生命周期的加工路线对环境的影响，因此将根据经济价值进行分配，而不是应用系统扩展。由于系统扩展仅提供了第一产品生命周期和第二产品生命周期的汇总视图，因此在第一生命周期结束时无法提供有关相关CE策略的决策支持。经济分配基于相应最终用途方案的方案智能手机输入流中的剩余市场价值与原始价格之间的比率。

为了达到结果的可比性，为每种情况定义了第二个使用时间参数。此参数考虑到第二次使用时间仅达到智能手机平均使用时间的一定份额。

结果

这项研究表明，通过所有三种循环策略，可以减少所研究的影响类别-全球变暖潜能值（GWP）和非生物耗竭潜能值（ADP）。

结论

经过分析的使用和维修终端使用情况表明，就循环经济而言，智能手机具有最大的潜力，因为大多数环境影响可以分配给设备生产，以及执行CE策略的其他步骤的影响（例如，废弃手机的收集，翻新）的比例较低。