Callie Babbitt
Rochester Institute of Technology
Dr. Callie Babbitt is an Associate Professor in the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology, where she conducts research to proactively quantify and minimize environmental impacts of emerging technologies. Callie’s research group creates new methods and models in the field of industrial ecology that are inspired by the study of ecological systems in nature. They apply these models to study sustainability challenges and solutions for food waste management, consumer electronics, lithium-ion batteries, electric vehicles, and nanomaterials.
Electronic waste is a well-studied but still intractable issue: much is known about environmental impacts of e-waste disposal and design, economic, and policy complications of expanding e-waste recycling. However, sustainable solutions are still challenging to put in practice and cannot keep pace with the rising tide of consumption. Some of these challenges are rooted in the industrial ecology methods used to inform e-waste management. For example, material flow analyses used to estimate e-waste volumes are typically static, and don’t account for technological progress or consumer trends. In addition, policy focus on specific “target” materials, like lead, do not account for emerging materials of concern, like mercury, indium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. Fundamentally, e-waste assessments are “backwards-looking”, analyzing products that are well established in the market, a simplification often necessary due to data and modeling limitations. For research to adequately inform e-waste policy, design, and management, analyses must be more proactive: identifying emerging technologies and materials of concern; creating scenarios of future product adoption, and assessing new business models, like circular economy, for their relevance to rapidly evolving consumer technology.
Therefore, this research focused on creating a materials management model that includes past, current, and projected future trends in consumer electronic product adoption in the United States. Product sales, ownership, mass, and material content data were compiled from the Consumer Technology Association, public literature, and empirical product teardown and used to parameterize a material flow analysis applied to all of the major technology products owned and used in U.S. households from 1990-2015. This baseline enables retroactive assessment of past strategies and proactive scenario analysis of future product adoption (e.g., internet of things devices). A key result is that while new product adoption continues to rise (~15% annually), the overall mass of the e-waste stream has actually begun to decline, largely due to technological progress and consumer preference, as seen by phase-out of cathode ray tube (CRT) TVs and monitors and introduction and subsequent lightweighting of liquid crystal displays (LCDs). Directed policy intervention also played a role; for example, in reducing the net amounts of mercury and lead in the e-waste stream after introduction of RoHS and transition from fluorescent to LED backlighting in LCD displays.
However, the products in the electronics “ecosystem” have also diversified, leading to new challenges. When considering e-waste from a circular economy perspectives, there is a significant mismatch between materials demanded by products entering the market in a given year and the materials contained in products being recycled that year, which limits loop closing strategies. The trend towards small, mobile devices has led to greater needs for lithium-ion battery recycling and new business models for recyclers accustomed to deep disassembly of high-mass products like computers and TVs, whose presence in the waste stream is declining. In addition to sharing these results, the presentation will also discuss how this model is being adapted and applied to assess new technologies as they enter the market.
• Socio-economic metabolism and material flow analysis , • Circular economy
