Major goals have been achieved in both domains of the project: To design products for a Circular Economy and to keep (existing) products in a Circular Economy.
Modularity of the Fairphone 2 has demonstrated to enhance recyclability of materials significantly. A Life Cycle Assessment analyzed the environmental impacts of going modular: Additional connectors, printed circuit board area and module housing do not come for free, but increase the environmental footprint of production. This additional footprint is easily offset through a better reparability, thus longer assumed use time of the phone. These findings inspired the design of a follow-up model of the Fairphone.
Circular Devices developed a connector solution for the modular concept of a Puzzlephone and filed a related patent. This is a major step towards modularity of information technology devices. The modular connector solution is demonstrated on the example of an Internet-of-Things gateway device.
For SMEs it is challenging to get sustainable high-tech products off the ground. High investment to ramp up production is a barrier. MicroPro developed a tablet to overcome this barrier. Design of the housing and main structural parts took into account the manufacturing capabilities of sophisticated FabLabs or similar digital workshop environments. MicroPro assembled a pilot batch of 30 units of this D4R tablet to demonstrate the feasibility of such a small scale production through partnering with other production environments (for wood and metal working respectively). This device has been tested successfully against CE criteria and was subject to a user testing campaign, which yielded feedback on how to set up a future exploitation strategy.
Splitting the functionality of mobile IT devices in distinct modular building blocks reduces complexity of the main printed circuit board and facilitates repair and servicing of a device. The PCB of a voice recorder has been redesigned to accommodate four distinct modules, including a backbone board, a processor module, a power module, and an USB connector module being produced as prototypes and merged in a joint assembly. Embedding technology is the enabler to build miniaturized board level modules. AT&S produced a prototype of a reversible interconnection technology.
According to Blancco’s findings devices in second-hand markets and resold through reburbishers are still prone to improper data sanitization. Moreover, evaluation of default factory reset processes also showed data partially or in full present on some Android phones. Therefore, two concepts of erasure solutions have been developed and verified externally to tackle this problem. One method is meant for devices which will be reused as a whole and the second for those where only internal memory will be repurposed.
Batteries contained in a used product might still be good for reuse and repurposing. Fraunhofer IZM investigated ageing models and now the state-of-health can be determined by knowing the history of such a battery. A software interface extracts instantly battery state-of-health data from those mobile batteries, which are equipped with a smart battery chip.
As long as products with significantly enhanced modularization and thus reparability, recyclability and reusability do not hit the market at large, end-of-life processes need to be advanced: Automated sorting of smartphones for remanufacturing and component reuse requires gentle handling. Feeders have been investigated and are ready for implementation in a sorting process, including optical model recognition. The disassembly step features a collaborative robotics platform. TUW calculated a range of scenarios to guide a potential set up of a larger disassembly cluster. Extraction of boards is followed by desoldering of semiconductors (Ball Grid Array components). The individual rework steps for BGAs have been implemented on lab scale and demonstrators, incorporating reused semiconductor components, passed manufacturer’s reliability tests.
iFixit developed the scientific basis for a reparability scoring and implemented this algorithm in a webtool.
