What is the carbon footprint of my smartphone on the environment? Behind this simple question hides an ultra-complex calculation that Fairphone tries to popularize by taking, of course, its own phone as an example.
Fairphone plays on transparency. The Dutch company, which has made a specialty of selling repairable and environmentally responsible phones, has just published the life cycle analysis (LCA) of its latest phone, the Fairphone 4. The conclusions of the report are obvious, but deserve to be remembered: the best way to reduce the carbon footprint of your phone is to keep it as long as possible.
In the case of the Fairphone 4, use the phone for five years”could reduce the phone’s annual carbon footprint by 31%“. Using it for seven years, “emissions fall by 44%“, according to the company. To put it more simply, the emissions emitted during the production of the phone are more “profitable” ecologically if you keep your phone for a long time. The total carbon footprint being gradually “diluted” in what the earth is capable of absorbing CO2 every year.
What is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
To assess the carbon footprint of its phone, Fairphone used a standardized calculation method called life cycle analysis. According to Ademe (the Ecological Transition Agency), the life cycle analysis (LCA) takes into account “inventory of flows, from cradle to grave: extraction of energy and non-energy raw materials needed to manufacture the product, distribution, use, collection and disposal to end-of-life channels, as well as all transport phases“. Rather than simply quantifying the CO2 released during the construction of the smartphone, the LCA will take into account the energy spent during recharging and when putting the phone in the dumpster. This method has the advantage to be much more exhaustive than the simple calculation at the factory.
“We call flow everything that goes into the manufacture of the product and everything that comes out in terms of pollution. Among the incoming flows, we find, for example, those of materials and energy: iron resources, water, oil, gas. As for outgoing flows, they can correspond to waste, gaseous emissions, rejected liquid, etc.“, specifies the Ademe on its site.
The impressive study conducted by Fairphone (215 pages all the same) makes it possible to assess the role of each of the components in the total carbon footprint of the phone. On construction alone, it is unsurprisingly the motherboard which consumes the most CO2, representing 71% of emissions on its own.
According to the study, the Fairphone 4 releases 43 kilograms of CO2 equivalent, a figure slightly higher than the Fairphone 3 due to new features and on-board components and “a higher proportion of shipments by air during the Covid-19 period and the microchip crisis“. Without surprise, “most of the emissions and consumption of finite resources occurring at the time of production of the device“, admits Fairphone.
On the consumer side, the best way to reduce its impact (besides keeping your phone for a long time) is to repair it as much as possible. “The emissions created by the production of these spare parts, their packaging and their dispatch to the user, or the sending of the device to a repair center, are thus theoretically offset after only a few weeks of additional use of the device. device repaired“, details the company.
Software liability
Finally, one of the last important bricks to reduce the carbon footprint of the smartphone is obviously software monitoring. The longer a phone receives security updates, the less essential it will be to replace it. From this point of view, few players in the Android world are above reproach. Samsung and Google offer between four and five years of follow-up and even Fairphone does not currently commit beyond 2025.
As we can see, accurately quantifying the carbon footprint of a smartphone today requires a lot of work. But what the example of Fairphone clearly shows is that even if you are very careful about what you buy and how you treat your smartphone, there are still great efforts to be made before achieving “sustainable” consumption. Remember that in France, according to Arcep, “the duration of individual use of smartphones is estimated between 23 months and 37“. Far from the seven years, therefore, advanced by Fairphone, or the 10 proposed by other players in the industry. So, it bears repeating: the greenest smartphone is the one you already have on you.