Take a guess: how many liters of water are consumed in the manufacture of a single cell phone? What about how many days of household electricity you could save by recycling 3 desktop PCs?
Today, Lifespan is proud to announce the public availability of the Lifespan Environmental Effect Finder, or LEEF. This free tool allows anyone to answer these and other questions about their positive impact on the environment through the proper recycling of their electronic waste. LEEF is the product of 18 months of research and development, starting with extensive research on life cycle analyses for the various materials that electronic devices contain. These life cycle analyses track every environmental impact associated with the extraction, processing, and production of each material by including as many indirect factors as possible, such as transportation.
LEEF also leverages Lifespan’s industry knowledge. To retrieve reliable numbers for the average weight of components and materials in a piece of electronic equipment, large quantities of computers and other devices had to be broken down to their smallest components and weighed individually. We then averaged and benchmarked for the top twenty-five to thirty most common device types to enter our facility.
As a result of this meticulous process, any quantity of e-waste from a single cell phone or laptop to multiple tons of electronics can be entered into the calculator, offering a breakdown which reveals its surprisingly large environmental impact. The research and analysis techniques utilized in LEEF are so cutting-edge that it has been honored as a semi-finalist in the 2014 Recycling Innovators Forum.
Our primary goal is for LEEF to be accessible to every consumer or employee, regardless of his or her background or organization. For this reason, our calculator outputs results in easy-to-understand and relatable units of impact. For example, LEEF will display water use as the number of minutes spent showering in addition to the quantity of liters used. We sincerely hope you will find this tool useful in making recycling decisions at your home or place of business, and that it helps illuminate the immense environmental impacts of electronics manufacturing, which can be offset or mitigated through proper recycling.
