Integrating Environmental and Social Life Cycle Assessment: Asking the Right Question

Abstract

Mobile phones offer many potential social benefits throughout their lifetime, but this life is often much shorter than design intent. Reuse of the phone in a developing country allows these social benefits to be fully realized. Unfortunately, under the current state of development of recycling infrastructure, recovery rates of phones after reuse are very low in those markets, which may lead to an environmental burden attributed to loss of materials to landfill. In order to recover those materials most effectively, recycling in developed countries may be the best option, but at a cost of the ability to reuse the phones. The issues facing integration of social and environmental concerns into a single life cycle assessment (LCA) and resulting challenges of identifying the disposal option with the most sustainable outcome are explored using mobile phones as a case study. These include obtaining sufficient geographical and temporal detail of the end-of-life options, collation and analysis of the large amounts of data generated, and weighting of the disparate environmental and social impact categories. The numerous challenges may mount up to make performing LCA of mobile phones unwieldy. Instead of trying to encompass every aspect in full, it is proposed that focus is given to answering a question that takes into account the resources available: It is important to ask the question that has the best chance of being answered.