Community Ecology Perspectives on the Structural and Functional Evolution of Consumer Electronics

Abstract

Summary This article describes how biological ecology models are adapted to analyze the dynamic structure and function of a consumer electronic product “community.” Treating an entire group of interdependent and continually evolving electronic devices as an ecological community provides a basis for more comprehensive analyses of the energy, material, and waste flows associated with household consumption than would be possible using conventional per product approaches. Results show that, similar to a maturing natural community, the average U.S. household electronic product community evolved from a low‐diversity structure dominated by a few products to a highly diverse, evenly distributed community of products between 1990 and 2010. The maturing community of household electronics experienced increased functionality at a community and product level resulting, in part, from introduction of new products, but primarily as a result of increasing ownership of multifunctional products. Multifunctional mobile products are driving increased functionality in a manner similar to a broadly adaptive invasive species, but the community's high functional redundancy, as the result of device convergence, resembles a stable natural community. These results suggest that future strategies to encourage green design, production, and consumption of consumer electronics should focus on minimizing the total number of products owned by maximizing multifunctionality with convergent device design.

Dematerialization and the Circular Economy: Comparing Strategies to Reduce Material Impacts of the Consumer Electronic Product Ecosystem

“…This MFA evaluates material flows in terms of changes in the ecosystem by building upon the community approach taken by Ryen and colleagues (). By taking a systematic “bottom‐up” or “time‐step” approach that begins with the product community structure (how many of each product species are contained in the system boundaries over time), this method avoids reliance on product life spans, input‐output tables (Di Donato et al.…”

“…This research aims to investigate the ecosystem of consumer electronics, including both the community structure described by Ryen and colleagues (), and the extent to which environmental forces (such as consumer preference or available income) alter the attendant ecosystem‐level material flows. The benefits of the household ecosystem approach are threefold.…”

“…In the case of consumer electronics, this rebound effect (or Jevons paradox) has been observed in both an increased product ownership leading to greater cumulative impact (Ryen et al. , ) or in an increased product performance, resulting in no net material reduction (Kasulaitis et al. ).…”

“…; Gutowski ). Ryen and colleagues (, 3) drew an analogy between a biological community, or group of organisms living and interacting within a defined habitat, and a consumer electronic product community as “an assemblage of products that exist and interact directly or indirectly in a shared spatial or temporal setting.” When applied to electronic products in U.S. households between 1990 and 2010, this community ecology framework captured the changing life cycle energy impact associated with dynamic trends in product consumption and use, which could not be detected when analyzing a single product at a time (Ryen et al. ).…”

“…Translating this concept to the IE space, we can expand the product community approach to include external factors (regulations, consumption trends) and abiotic flows (material consumption, waste) to consider the broader framework of a product ecosystem. To this end, this paper connects traditional MFA methodology with the community structure developed by Ryen and colleagues () to evaluate the material flows through a dynamic consumer electronic product ecosystem. Here, we have a compelling opportunity to advance IE methods and at the same time provide a more complete picture of the temporal trends in systems‐level material usage (Hirato et al.…”