Greener electronics

Print 11 Dec December 2014
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Increasing use of electronics in many areas benefits society as well as individuals. At the same time increased use of computers, pads, cell phones, integrated circuits in smart products generates new challenges.

This project aims to identify and describe key areas that need further research and development, for an increased use of electronic products not to threaten the development towards a more sustainable society.

  • energy use in the usage phase as well as in the production phase (the later starts to increase in relative terms, partly due to shorter service life).

  • rare metals issues –scarce resource with impacts in mining and production and as e-waste, spreading new metals in ecosystems.

  • social issues of the life cycle – e-waste and developing countries, availability to whom? etc.


The devices that are developed in the group ‘Automated forest monitoring’ can be used as a possible case study to investigate the consequences of their deployment and to propose potential improvements.

Dream Team
The project is open for students from all subject areas with an interest in sustainability issues. Pre knowledge on environmental issues related to electronics is beneficial but not crucial.

A dream team of students would consist of a mix of students with background in

  • electronics or electric engineering to help understand what could be inside the devices we are talking about,
  • biology, environmental science or ecology to help understand effects in the biosphere from the flows generated by electronic devices
  • design, business or social sciences connecting effects from use of electronic devices with human needs and human well-fare
  • other areas of study giving context to the cross disciplinary understanding

Apply to the project

If you have any questions about the project, please contact
Prof. Morgan Fröling, Mid Sweden University, Email: morgan.froling@miun.se

Read more about the lecturers

Reading material

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Environmental Performance of Data Centres - A Case Study of the Swedish National Insurance Administration

Green Electronics? - An LCA Based Study of Eco-labeling of Laptop Computers

The preparation material for the “Green Electronics” project include  two short conference papers, from studies where I first got aware of that for electronics it is not always so that the use phase have the larger environmental impact – the production of electronic products could be a significant part of the life cycle environmental impact of electronic equipment.

Those two studies note this from more traditional environmental parameters, like climate impacts. But to a rather large extent the climate impacts are connected to the use of special minerals and metals.

However, some of these metals - that we are becoming increasingly dependent on for electronic products -  are also metals of which we have rather small known resources. (I also attach a figure illustrating this)

So how large is this problem – for computer, mobile phones and other electronic equipment? Is it perhaps even a threat against introduction of electrical vehicles, internet communication etc?

These are issues I hope we will come to a better understanding of during the Summer University.

So, please look at these two short conference papers on environmental impacts from lap top computers and on computer centers, and the figure on limited metal resources. The later figure comes from a scientific article that if you are interested to read more of the background is available here:www.science.org.au/nova/newscientist/027ns_005.htm

I’m looking forward to meet you in Sundsvall!