Authors
Talens Peiró, Laura; Gabarrell Durany, Xavier
Abstract
The availability of digital tools is key for reproducible, robust, and transparent analysis. Thanks to digitalization, life cycle assessment (LCA) has become a well-established tool to perform environmental assessment of products and systems. However, despite the existence of diverse commercial software for LCA, data availability is still one of the major limitations. This paper introduces two databases that aims to shed light in the analysis of electric and electronic equipment (EEE): the database of SEmiconductors and other components (DoSE) and the Life Cycle Assessment database (LCADB). DoSE is a database that aims to provide data for a better analysis of EEE. DoSE contains information of three major aspects of EEE: the internal design, the lifetime and the material composition. Information about the internal design of the products includes pictures to facilitate the location and the assembly of the PCB within an EEE, and information about the disassembly sequence and diagrams illustrating the steps to harvest the PCB. DoSE allows including information about the estimated lifetime of the EEE and the method used to estimate it, both useful for prospective analysis of the amount of future wasted EEE and material recovery. The material composition section has two main section: one section about the material composition of semiconductors and other components, and a second section where the material composition of components is used to estimate the material composition of the PCB of the EEE. Data from DoSE is exportable to excel format to allow for a further use, as well as exportable as an activity to the LCADB database to develop new LC inventories of EEE. All these functionalities are due to be further expanded and tested for the case of batteries and electronics in electric vehicles as part of the digital platform for circular economy developed in the scope of the DigiPrime project (https://www.digiprime.eu/).