Designing more sustainable hardware is no longer a niche ideal: it’s a practical urgency. The devices we carry, charge and replace every year leave a large environmental footprint from mining to disposal. Designers who try to build greener products run into technical, economic and social barriers that often force trade-offs between sustainability goals and what customers expect: thinness, low cost, and cutting-edge performance. In this article, I combine recent studies, industry examples and user experiences to show where the hardest problems lie — and what designers, companies and policymakers are doing about them. According to the Global E-waste Monitor, 2024, the world produced a record 62 billion kilograms of electronic waste in 2022, and only about one in five kilograms of that e-waste was documented as collected and recycled in an environmentally sound way.
In This Article
- Materials: Rare, Messy and Expensive
- Repairability Versus Reality: Good Design Meets Human Friction
- Measurement Headaches: LCA, Data Gaps and Design Tools
- What Works: Rules, Product Strategies and Examples
- How Designers Can Act Right Now — Practical, Evidence-Backed Steps
- Conclusion
Materials: Rare, Messy and Expensive
A core design challenge is that the materials that make gadgets small, fast and long-lasting are often the same materials that make them hard to repair or recycle. Batteries, soldered chips and mixed plastics are efficient for manufacturing and performance, but they lock parts together and hide valuable metals. Designers aiming to reduce embodied carbon and toxic residues must choose components and assembly methods that industrial supply chains don’t always support.
A clear example: Fairphone has built its brand around using repairable modules and responsibly sourced materials, but even that approach carries real costs and complexity for designers. A decade of experience at Fairphone shows the gains of modularity — more repairability and longer software support — yet the company still faces high part costs and limited scale when trying to source traceable minerals. According to Fairphone’s 2023 impact report, the company documents carbon and social-sourcing efforts while acknowledging trade-offs between durability, cost and market demand.
Designers also face material supply constraints: recycled streams don’t always supply consistent, high-quality metals for new components. That means even when a team designs for recyclability, the materials simply may not be available at scale. Researchers doing lifecycle analysis show that improvements in one stage (for example, using more recycled copper) can be offset by increased impacts elsewhere unless the whole chain is redesigned. A recent life-cycle assessment study in Nature found that product-level circular changes (like redesigning circuit boards) can reduce impact, but they require parallel changes in manufacturing and recycling systems to deliver net benefits.
Repairability Versus Reality: Good Design Meets Human Friction
Putting screws instead of glue, offering replaceable modules, and publishing repair guides are straightforward design moves. Yet making repair practical for a mass market is another matter. Framework and Fairphone have both shown that consumers will use repairable designs, but user stories and community forums also reveal how warranty policies, part pricing and logistics can erode the gains designers expect.
Framework’s modular laptop demonstrates the upside. According to Lifewire, many users have upgraded RAM, storage, or ports themselves, extending device life and reducing the need for replacement purchases. Founder Nirav Patel has argued publicly that the industry’s throwaway model is a design choice, not an inevitability. However, repairable design brings operational burdens — parts inventories, longer support horizons, and more complex warranty scenarios — that companies must fund and manage. As Framework expands its modular line and secures more funding, it has been candid about those business challenges.
Real-world user accounts highlight friction. Community posts and independent reviews contain both praise for repairability and complaints about service turnaround times or unexpected costs for major modules. One long-running thread from users who own repairable devices shows that when a core component fails (a motherboard or a mainboard), repair costs can still approach the price of a new device, which undermines the promise of lower lifetime environmental costs when repairs are unaffordable. These stories matter because they show how design intent collides with customer expectations and the economics of repair logistics..
Measurement Headaches: LCA, Data Gaps and Design Tools
Designers want to know whether a change truly lowers environmental harm. That sounds simple — but measuring impacts across extraction, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life is technically hard. Lifecycle assessment (LCA) methods are improving, but they are data-intensive, brittle to assumptions and often delivered too late in a product’s design cycle to shape decisions.
Academic and industry work in the last two years has pushed new LCA tools and workflows closer to designers, but the integration gap remains. Research into incorporating LCA into electronics design shows that designers need faster, easier and more contextualised tools that reflect trade-offs — for example, when a heavier but repairable chassis reduces lifetime emissions by preventing full replacement, versus when added weight increases use-phase energy loss. An arXiv analysis from 2025 documents obstacles and opportunities for embedding LCA into live design work, arguing that better toolchains and more accessible data are essential if designers are to choose the right compromises early on.
One concrete consequence: without reliable LCA insights during ideation, product teams may default to visible metrics (weight, thickness, cost) rather than invisible system impacts (scope-3 carbon, supply-chain social risks). That’s why designers repeatedly describe sustainability targets as “nice to have” when they conflict with launch schedules or procurement constraints. The research community and a few forward-looking companies are beginning to change that by offering delta-LCA workflows and component-level datasets, but adoption is still limited outside specialist teams.
What Works: Rules, Product Strategies and Examples
Policy nudges and new business models move the needle. Extended producer responsibility (EPR), right-to-repair laws, and procurement standards that reward longevity encourage designers to prioritise repairable assemblies and longer software support windows. We can point to real company strategies that illustrate workable approaches.
Fairphone has committed to long software support and modularity — the company publicly promises up to eight years of software updates for recent models, a move that reduces forced obsolescence for users who keep phones for longer. But Fairphone’s path also shows limits: it remains a relatively small player with constrained parts supply and the economics of niche production. According to Wired’s recent reporting and Fairphone’s own disclosures, the company’s strategy has improved product longevity but also forced difficult choices about scale, marketing and profitability.
Framework provides another example: by selling a repairable laptop and a DIY edition, Framework shifts some responsibility and capability to users, which reduces the company’s logistics and encourages community maintenance. Reviews and product stories show the real benefits — fewer replacements, active communities and visible repair guides — while also flagging that customer support experiences and high-cost component failures still present real barriers.
Short case table (key numbers)
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Global e-waste generated (2022) | 62 billion kg | According to the Global E-waste Monitor, 2024. |
| Global documented recycling rate (2022) | 22.3% | According to the Global E-waste Monitor, 2024. |
| Fairphone community device count | ~400,000 users (cumulative) | According to Fairphone’s 2023 Impact Report. |
How Designers Can Act Right Now — Practical, Evidence-Backed Steps
Designers and product teams can make meaningful improvements today without waiting for global recycling to scale. First, bake longevity into requirements: set minimum support windows for software and spare-part availability, and treat those as non-negotiable product specs. Fairphone’s long-support promise is an instructive model; it shows that writing multi-year support into product strategy forces engineering and procurement to align.
Second, design for disassembly from day one. That means standard fasteners, modular connectors and clear labelling of plastics and metals so recyclers can sort materials more effectively. Framework’s modular port and upgradable mainboard approach shows designers the commercial path to repairability, but companies must also plan for the operational costs of parts provisioning and warranty handling.
Third, use pragmatic LCA tools early. Lightweight, scenario-based LCA that compares a few design choices (e.g., glued battery vs. replaceable battery) gives designers much better guidance than a full LCA late in the program. Recent academic work and industry tools provide delta-LCA workflows that are easier to run, and teams that adopt them reduce the risk of surprises at certification or end-of-life.
Finally, design business models to align incentives. Warranties, trade-in programs, subscription repairs, and leasing can make longer-lasting hardware economically viable. Policy and procurement that reward total cost of ownership over upfront price are equally important — when buyers value longevity, engineers get the mandate to design for it.
Conclusion
Designing truly eco-friendly hardware is neither easy nor free. It requires companies to invest in parts, support and data systems; it asks designers to rethink what matters; and it needs policies that reward longer life. But real examples from Fairphone and Framework show the path is practical and already working at a small scale. If designers, business leaders and regulators continue to push on materials transparency, repairability, and measurement tools, the cumulative effect could bend our electronics industry away from disposability and toward durability. The question now is not whether it’s possible — the question is whether enough firms will accept the upfront costs and organisational shifts to make sustainable hardware the default.
