Sustainable electronics: the criteria of a circular business

The impact of electronic sector on the environment concerns especially the wastefulness of available resources. Every year raw materials (mainly iron, copper and gold), worth a total of 60 billion dollars, are discarded early. These are resources that could be recovered and returned to the production cycle by reducing the emission of greenhouse gases produced by the extraction of new materials.

In this context, it becomes essential for every company to conform by introducing a model of circular economy in which materials and products can be reused.

How can you activate a circular business model? Shown below some advice:
– Align recycling technologies to the variety of materials used in production. Very high standards must be maintained to ensure the identification and separation of materials in the processing of final products.
– Reconfigure your supply-chain to support the collection and transport of materials for fixing, reuse and recycling.
– Design products with their “circularity” in mind, integrating the use of recycled or easy-to-recycle and repair material, improving the modularity and the ability of components to dismember and minimizing the application of adhesives and mixed components.
– Set up a reprocessing path for the components used. We could, for example, allocate basic components such as batteries, sensors, hard drivers and chips for reuse in high-performance applications or in thriving technologies that need them such as the IoT.
– Optimize the procurement processes of materials and the so-called “industrial synergy”. For some types of materials, such as steel, it is in fact difficult to convert waste materials deriving from electronic components. In these cases, it is useful to activate intersectoral collaborations between different industries for the exchange of recyclable materials.