Summary The rapid technological evolution and adoption of consumer electronics highlights a growing need for adaptive methodologies to evaluate material consumption at the intersection of technological change and increasing consumption. While dematerialization and the circular economy (CE) have both been proposed to mitigate increasing material consumption, recent research has shown that these methods may be ineffective at achieving net material use reduction: When focused on specific products, these methods neglect the effects of complex interactions among and increasing consumption of consumer electronic products. The research presented here develops and applies a material flow analysis aimed at evaluating an entire “product ecosystem,” thereby including the effects of increasing consumption, product trade‐offs, and technological innovations. Results are then used to evaluate the potential efficacy of “natural” dematerialization (occurring as technology advances or smaller products substitute for larger ones) and CE (closing the loop between secondary material supply and primary material demand). Results show that material consumption by the ecosystem of electronics commonly used by U.S. households peaked in 2000. This consumption relies on increasingly diverse materials, including gold, cobalt, and indium, for whom secondary supply is still negligible, particularly given low recovery rates, often less than 1%. Potential circularity metrics of material “dilution,” “dispersion,” and “demand mismatch” are also evaluated, and indicate that CE approaches aimed at closing the loop on consumer electronic material still face several critical barriers particularly related to design and efficient recycling infrastructure.

Consumer electronic products have a complex life cycle, characterized by environmental, social, and economic impacts and benefits associated with their manufacturing, use, and disposal at endof-life. Accurately analysing these trade-offs and creating sustainable solutions requires data about the materials and components that make up these devices. Such information is rarely disclosed by manufacturers and only exists in the open literature in disparate case study format. this study presents a comprehensive database of bill of material (BOM) data describing the mass of major materials and components contained in 95 unique consumer electronic products. Data are generated by product disassembly and physical characterization and then validated against external benchmarks in the literature. The study also contributes a reproducible framework for organizing BOM data so that they can be expanded as new products enter the market. These data will benefit researchers studying all aspects of electronics and sustainability, including material scarcity, product design, environmental life cycle assessment, electronic waste policy, and environmental health and safety.

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Advances in electronic technologies have the potential to enable energy efficiency and climate mitigation but may also create climate impacts due to resource and energy use across the product life cycle. These tradeoffs revolve around the way electronics are designed, manufactured, purchased, used, and disposed and the ability to shift these systems toward resource efficiency. A promising strategy for consumer electronics is to facilitate adoption of lightweight, energy‐efficient, multi‐functional devices as replacements for the many single‐function electronic products currently owned. However, consumer preferences and willingness to make this shift remain unclear. Here, a survey of 1,011 adults across the United States demonstrated theoretical potential for material efficiency gains, as respondents indicated willingness to accept a smaller number of multi‐functional devices, such as smartphones, as replacements for specialized electronics, including digital cameras, camcorders, and MP3 players. However, when actually choosing electronics to be used for common functions, such as watching TV, getting directions, surfing the Internet, or writing an email, consumers indicated strong preferences for products with the highest perceived quality for those tasks. Multi‐functional devices such as tablets were only reported to be used for a small number of the functions they can provide and were typically redundant complements to existing products, rather than substitutes. Findings suggest a limit to material intensity reductions via device convergence alone. Dematerialization of this sector will likely require coupled efforts to design multi‐functional products for improved performance while also improving the material and climate footprint of products that consumers are unwilling to replace. This article met the requirements for a gold‐gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.