Trends in the lifespan evolution of personal computers and implications for life cycle assessment studies: A case study of the U.S. higher education sector

Abstract

WHEN considering environmental impacts associated with the upstream and downstream processes in electronic product life cycles, product lifespan is obviously a fundamental variable of interest. Not only does lifespan dictate the manufacturing energy and impacts created due to product replacement, but also the quality and operational characteristics of obsolete equipment requiring end-of-life (EOL) management. Furthermore, technological progress and the evolution of product lifespan are expected to induce changes in the environmental characteristics of manufacturing processes, performance characteristics of products, and in how consumers purchase, use and dispose of products. Nevertheless, existing studies and life cycle assessments (LCAs) of electronic products, almost without exception, consider lifespan to be constant over time. Although this oversimplifying assumption is often required by the scarcity of publicly available and temporally variable data, it also represents a fundamental methodological challenge inherent to LCAs and other approaches used to inform environmental management and policy decisions.