The dirty little secret about environmental impact

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When it comes to sustainable product design, if it has a circuit board, it’s environmental impact is big.  So big that changing the housing from a standard plastic to an eco-friendly option is often insignificant.

How insignificant?  Epically insignificant.  Just check the stats (Thanks  Okala).

I used ABS as a benchmark because it’s something we all know (it’s the kind of the plastic they use for things like guitar hero controllers).

  • the board itself (just the green part) has an impact that is 10x-60x that of ABS
  • a capacitor’s impact is anywhere from 5x to 20x that of ABS
  • a resistor’s impact is anywhere from 3x to 50x that of ABS

Or in pie-chart speak:

Environmental Impact of product components

Spending time and money on the plastic housing to cut that green sliver in half just doesn’t seem so impressive anymore.

Unfortunately  I don’t have a solution other than coercing electrical guys to use less components  or to use boards made from chicken feathers (which seems less than sustainable).

Anybody else?  Ideas?

I’d love to use a PCB alternative.

Related posts:

  1. a quick tip for preventing PCB-induced stress
  2. designing for impact on off-road vehicles
  3. durometer table graphic

Tagged as: environmental impact, PCB

Article by chris loughnane

Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 127 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.

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  • http://nickstarno.info/ nick

    The environmental impact of creating circuit boards is a very interesting point that is hardly ever addressed.

    I think the greenest approach to circuit board design may not actually be in the material selection. Considering that circuit boards are an automated/predictable/controllable form of intelligence, its imperative that they perform at optimum levels and I can understand some leeway being given for production. However, the afterlife of the product (often containing a fully functional board) is where that initial investment in production becomes a big double negative in the end.

    The greenest solution in my eyes would be to design circuit boards with open platforms so that we can recycle them not as raw materials, but as reusable intelligence. At the very least allowing the user (or a vendor) to wipe the chip clean of any proprietary functions and/or firmware. Morally it makes a lot of sense, but there are at least two giant hurdles:

    1. Design for dis-assembly
    2. Capitalism

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    It's a really good point… burning in the components doesn't really lead to reuse.

    I wonder if the pareto principle applies here. Is 80% of the logic on a product reusable? If companies institute take-back programs (like they are demanding for some products in Europe) that would incentivize them to take a more modular approach to PCBs.

    Of course the downside of reusing PCBs is that there will almost always be superfluous logic on the board in it's second context… which could increase packaging size.

    What exactly do you mean by “capitalism” being a giant hurdle?

  • http://nickstarno.info/ Nick

    What I meant by “capitalism” being a hurdle is that it will be difficult to convince a number-crunching business executive that using modular PCBs with no proprietary value and producing significantly less of them per year is a smart strategy to grow their enterprise.

  • http://www.pdnotebook.com/ loughnane

    I don't necessarily agree. IBM has been making profit off of open source Linux for a long time. Likewise, Motorola, HTC, etc. are making some loot off of android's open source operating system.

    I think businesses have long since acknowledged (if not universally embraced) the open source software as a viable, profitable option.

    I think it is just a matter of time before hardware moves in the same direction. As engineers we already reuse as much as we can and only invent what we need to. I bet we could come up with a reasonably compelling business plan for modular PCBs.