According to the widespread of EEE, run-out of certain materials so-called critical metals have become a big anxiety. Functionalities of EEE required from consumers are becoming high year by year, and such critical metals are necessary to enhance functionalities. Thus, the key of product development is to reduce the metal consumption and achieve high functionalities. In other words, high resource efficiency is the key of sustainable production. This paper proposes an index to evaluate resource efficiency of small-sized EEE. The index has value of the product based on the functionality, product reusability, and component reusability, as the numerator. And it has the total amount of environmental impact due to material consumption measured by TMR (total material requirement) minus recoverable environmental impact as the denominator. Through the case studies on mobile phones, the paper concludes that the proposed index will be useful in evaluating resource efficiency of EEE.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.