 Thanks, everybody. So looking through the list of people we have in the chat, it's great to see some familiar names with us this evening. But I'm aware that many people may be less familiar with the restart project and restart in general. So I'll start with a quick introduction as to who we are before we get going. So for those of you who are new to a restart project, we're a small charity and social enterprise based in London in the UK, although we work with community groups around the UK and around the world. We help these community groups run repair events for their local communities, such as restart parties or repair cafes. These events volunteers help members of the public repair their broken possessions, electronics, or in other cases, clothes, furniture, you name it. We've probably fixed it at some point. The idea is to give these broken possessions a new lease of life, saving waste, building community, and reducing carbon emissions in the process. Repair helps us use our devices for longer and reduces the need to buy new ones, which is something we'll touch on a little bit later. We also help these groups collect data about the repairs they make, and we use this data to campaign for the right to repair, both in the UK and in the EU, through the European Right to Repair Campaign, which we co-founded. But this data is also useful to measure the environmental benefits of repair events, which is why we're here this evening. And we've built a tool called the Fixometer to help us do this. Fixometer lets volunteers estimate the amount of CO2 equivalent that they prevented from each successful repair at each event. But it's worth pointing out, as we all discovered this evening, making this kind of model is not an easy task. So we use a very simplified model to do this. And we'll explore some of the intricacies of this methodology a bit later on. But despite all of this, we estimate that we saved about 660 metric tons of CO2 equivalent across the network so far. And that's about the same as planting 6,000 trees over a 10-year period. We've just completed a new project, though, to update the way that we make these calculations. And that's the story that we'll be sharing this evening. First, though, we'll need to explore how it's even possible to measure the carbon impact of electronics in the first place. So I think now might be a good time to close the poll that we have going. Thank you to everyone who responded. So the poll is now closed. And here are the results. If you can't see the results now, post in the chat. But as you can see, it looks like most people know a little bit about dystopic. But not too many people are very familiar, and we don't seem to have that many experts in the room tonight. But that said, I'm assuming some people might be underestimating how much they know. So we'll see exactly what comes out from everyone later on. But for those of you, for 31% of you, for whom this is totally new, don't worry, we will be starting with the basics. And as I said before, we're not going to be diving into the deep end. We're not going to get too technical this evening. But if you do have any more technical questions, maybe bung them in a chat, and then we can find a way to get back to you perhaps after the session. But in this session, we're going to try and keep it relatively simple, just sharing the main essence. OK, so now I'd like to bring in Jessica, who has been publishing papers in this area for many years, and will help guide us through the intricacies of lifecycle assessment analysis. All right, thanks, James. I have been publishing papers in the area of sustainable electronics, let's say. But I do have to do a full disclosure that, OK, I teach about LCA. I use LCA's a lot in my research. I've only done ever really one LCA myself. But doing the one myself did give me a lot of insight into it. And teaching this topic gives me some insight into it. But I also would struggle with where to put myself, because I know that there are many people who do actually research and do LCA's as their research all the time. So I'm between I'm familiar with this topic as a researcher, but I'm probably no more than an average person having done one. So that's my disclosure here. And today I'm going to bring out some of the things that I use when I'm teaching about LCA or explaining about LCA, trying to keep it simple, but at the same time trying to let you into a bit of the complexity that is lifecycle assessment. So the different steps that are involved without actually going too deep, as James said. So let's get started with this. Now, before we also start, I've mentioned who I am as a researcher. Who I am in relation to restart as well is under restart. One of the repair cafes. Yes, we sometimes steal your logo. Repair Cafe Malmo and Repair Cafe Lund are in Sweden. And I am a volunteer with both of these organizations as well as a researcher at Lund University at the triple IWE when we don't want to say the long name. So I have a day job researching sustainable electronics and I have a volunteer work also trying to be active with promoting sustainable electronics. And LCA is life cycle assessment. Let's think about this is going to be based on life cycle thinking then. The idea that our products have lives before they get into our life, before they become part of our lives and we're using them. They come from somewhere originally with raw materials and energy being used to extract those materials. They're manufactured and processed and then we're using them and then they're going someplace as well. And often we see them used, we see them and we think maybe about the waste that they become. But it's hard to get our heads around. We see some of the exposés and the news about materials but thinking are those materials actually in the things I'm using? Yes, and so making that connection is something that life cycle thinking can help us with. And then really doing an assessment of what materials, how much and what are the environmental impacts of those materials is part of a life cycle assessment. And there is a standard for this, the ISO 1440, I say it's 14,040. And it's a very general framework that tells the steps. So it's not like exactly what material you're gonna use but that you should have a goal first for doing your LCA. What are you trying to find out if you're doing this kind of assessment and going through the life cycle of a product? It might be where the hotspots are. You are also gonna then have to collect a lot of data. I'll go through all of these steps and then you're gonna see from this data, okay, where are the different impacts? Where are they in the life cycle? How are they tied to different components or different materials? And then this is also part of the interpretation then along the way, what do you make of this? Results can be used in different ways. They're used by companies to make decisions about design and strategic planning, what kind of strategies to use in designing the products or in designing their business model. So you can also do it on the business. Policy makers, we have also right now, James had mentioned this in our talk before about the product environmental footprint in the pilot stage and it's been in the pilot stage for a long time. But this idea that life cycle assessment can then be part of our public policymaking and towards marketing as well and making claims and having those based on some kind of assessment. In public policymaking, we also see life cycle assessment. Not a full life cycle assessment, but parts of life cycle assessment approach, let's say a watered down version in our standards for products as well. So those are supposed to be based on life cycle analysis, at least. And when we're thinking I mentioned about the goal and scope and there could be different reasons for doing a life cycle assessment. So it could be understanding the environmental impact of the product. It could be understanding what stages or processes have the contribute the most to the overall environmental impact or impacts. We're gonna talk about that, yes, you can measure carbon but you can also measure quite a few other environmental impacts. It might be helping you determine what improvements, like where should you spend your energy improving and testing out some ideas for design. It can also help you with which product is better from a life cycle perspective but as James is also gonna talk about that gets tricky unless that's your actual goal of your life cycle assessment. So if you're comparing life cycle assessment to life cycle assessment, they aren't always having to set that goal from the beginning to be comparative. So they won't have done things the same way. So that'll make it hard to compare unless it's actually part of the goal from the beginning. And as I mentioned also then what strategies can be used. And I'll show examples of these as I go through with different ways the life cycle can be, the life cycle assessment can be used. Also when we're determining the goal and the scope then we also have to think about what the product is and what we're measuring here. So one thing when I'm teaching there's a lot of confusion. Sometimes we're just talking about the environmental impacts of a phone or a light bulb as I did my light bulb. But what we're really talking about is the function of that product when we're comparing and we're doing a life cycle assessment. So not just that product not working but that product actually functioning on. Which means we also have to think about things like how long we want that product to be functioning and what level, what quality it should have and functioning. So not just one light bulb but rather how much light from this light bulb kind of lumens per watt over time should I be considering. So this is what we're actually measuring when we're doing life cycle assessments which means we also have to be taking into account the use stage there. And a lot of assumptions then on what we expect from that product. And I had this stage of inventory. So kind of where you start with a life cycle assessment you start with that product. Again, I did a light bulb. You could start with your mobile phone as I have a picture here. And you're thinking what's in this? The first thing you need to know are what are the materials and the components? This is where we start with our inventory where it starts. And if you're working with a company you might be getting a bill of materials from them which would be great. Exactly what kind of components it has in it and exactly what kind of materials it has in it. But you often don't have that exactly, right? So you do a tear down on the product and you might weigh all of the materials and identify all of the components. How much do I have of plastics? How much do I have and what kind of components do I have in terms of electronics? And you collect these and then you start putting them together with usually a database you have of these processes. So the upstream processes. What's involved in extracting and processing to get to this plastic that we have as a casing let's say in our phones. And you're matching this then with, okay to make this plastic what are those environmental impacts upstream? How much different kinds of pollution do I have? So we measure the environmental impacts not just in carbon equivalent not just in climate and global warming but we might also have toxicity. We might also have how much water is used. You can do a water footprint as well as a carbon footprint. How much metal is used? These are all sorts of impacts that we can assign basically to this inventory of materials and components. And it produces really big spreadsheets here which is why it really helps to use databases that are already assembled for this rather than assembling your own database and why it is a big job to do an LCA. So this is just a screen of just what can fit on the screen of an inventory. But basically a gun it's going back through as an example here of the processes that would be involved in, for example, rare earth mining rare earths being in our phone here in parts of the magnet and parts of the screen. And the different processes that would then be there if I put in rare earths in my database it would be connecting this to the processes involved in mining and processing rare earths or what is known about those processes involved and what is known about the environmental impacts that come from those processes. So this is where it also helps to have access to databases that already have these almost like life cycle assessments inside of life cycle assessments, right? Of the processes. And I put here also just an example of something a little simpler here of the die or the die for the logic chip and this is from the Fairphone life cycle assessment just again looking through, okay what is the process involved in making this die manufacturing this die? And then you can see there the different environmental impacts that they have here and they're measured always like in one reference kind of impact. So when we talk about global warming we're often talking about many types of global warming gases, not just CO2. So we could be talking about methane we could be talking about ozone depleting substances and we're putting that into also a conversion so that everything comes out into CO2 or everything comes out into whatever has been decided as the reference category there. So like ecotoxicity has a reference of a certain kind of kind of fertilizer there. So then everything if it's worse than that you get more equivalent just like we see with CO2 but it gets equalized to it. Then you also have here in your inventory not just the materials that are in it but as I mentioned it's functioning, right? So how is it functioning and the use stage? And here is where you get a lot of assumptions about where it is used meaning what electricity use or mix you're gonna use in your use phase that makes a difference. Sometimes if you model it in Norway it'll have a much lower impact than if you model it in a place with a high fossil fuel in their electricity mix. You also have to consider how it is used charging cycles are you charging it every day? Are you leaving let's say with a light you're leaving it on a lot or are you saying you're using it just a little? So operational parts and how long? So then the lifetime of the product. And here they also include it again this is the Fairphone I put it in here because they're quite transparent with their LCA and what they put here this is their use. And you can see here also they have a use period of three years as a baseline. This is often the baseline in phones and I think James is gonna touch on this as well. They do vary it then because they do some scenarios but this is something that that's in these implicit in a lot of these LCA's there will be a lifetime implicit not all of the LCA's will be explicit in communicating what their assumptions are about that lifetime. So they might just give you the results but you don't know what did they assume that lifetime to be? So this is also part because part of the understanding the LCA's is understanding what assumptions were made about the use the lifetime because these make a big difference to the overall environmental impacts. There is also the end of life stage and assumptions about where and how the product is either disposed of recycled does it end up in landfill? And you can even do that on a material basis for there. So this is all part of compiling together this life cycle of a product. There are a lot of assumptions in an LCA about what is where your product what is in a product, where it came from exactly. So you have to know your supply chain well there are assumptions about how that product is going to be used and there are assumptions about how and what is gonna happen to that product once it reaches its end of life. So assumptions along the way that have to be modeled and once you've got your inventory of all these different processes and all these different impacts then as I mentioned they're gonna be put into some kind of reference there. Okay, so everything goes into aggregates into one impact category like global warming. And here I've just talked about that they also get weighted because a lot of the LCA's they're not just carbon so we're not just comparing carbon but they're gonna be comparing then global warming compared to toxicity and how do you do that? That's where you get weighted. What's a high score in or a high impact in toxicity then so that when you see them next to each other you know that something ooh it's really got a hot spot with toxicity but the global warming might not be as bad so how you weight these against each other is also part of a process if you're doing more than just carbon. So here we see examples I'm gonna show just a couple of examples. So LCA you can show the climate impacts with the carbon footprint as James is gonna go through. They're finding so we'll see more examples of those. With apples they showed really big what their carbon emissions were and that number three referred to that they said they followed the ISO standards there in the footnote. What was much smaller was actually the breakdown of those carbon emissions towards production and what was even smaller than where some of their assumptions about that how what size or what gigabyte what data they're using. So when they say 70 then you say okay this is the smallest version it goes up from there as well. These were much smaller boxes on there. So we can also choose what we how we visually show these results and communicate about LCA's. Here is the one from Fairfone Communicating and here they're communicating about a variety of environmental impacts as I mentioned here that you can have more than once you can have global warming here on the left global warming. And then you can have it on the right is eco toxicity and human toxicity. So there we see, oh okay actually when we wait these we see that these are also quite salient these are also important areas important impacts to take into consideration. It ultimately depends on on what we're trying to communicate about. Again, it gets much more complicated. The other thing that gets complicated is now what we don't see is exactly how much greenhouse gases are coming how much CO2. It's not clear from a figure that then is relative and you often see this either relative or in terms of like eco points so that you can compare across the different types of impacts which makes it hard then to work backwards to exactly what is that global warming potential? What does that mean? And in the text then I find, okay what they're saying is 39.5 is what they mean by that but it's not clear when you just see either a percentage or points what the actual global warming potential is in greenhouse gases. So this can make it difficult to navigate LCA's as well that they are presenting the information in quite different ways and sometimes they're only talking about carbon sometimes they're talking about a variety of environmental impacts. I mentioned that LCA's can also show impacts of different strategies and here I also pull out the Fairphone is doing this as well talking about, okay three years as a baseline but what if it is five years what does that do to the overall carbon footprint here? So it's global warming that we can see here global warming potential the carbon footprint goes down. So then they can assess what are the savings from going from three years to five years? Repair here you see adds a little bit to it because they're taking into account that you need to have an extra battery. So that increases your material again but they're saying but even with that battery it's worth prolonging the lifetime even with a replacement of your battery there. So they have battery there and other repairs like spare parts that you might need some new parts there. So they talk about different scenarios in their life cycle assessment. You can also compare products that I talk about but it has to be from the beginning the point of that LCA otherwise it gets very hard to compare one to one. Here is an example of an LCA that did do that from the beginning. And then you can see very clearly how they relate to each other. So this is incandescent versus fluorescent versus LED light bulbs but this was with that intention to do that. This is much harder to do and impossible in many cases to do if it hasn't been the goal of that LCA because the LCA's will be making different assumptions they might be using different approaches they might be even measuring different impacts one might be only global warming compared to others and approaching it in slightly different ways. Remembering that even though there's a standard it just says that they should state their goal and that they should put an inventory together. It's not standardized quite at that level for comparison. This is what the product environmental footprint at the EU is attempting to do to make it comparable. So this is something that they're trying to standardize what you should be what kind of databases you should be using and being a bit more standardized there. But there's still challenges to LCA's. Again, I'm talking about choices. So I might have a material that says, this is steel or this is iron and it's mined someplace but I still have assumptions about where that steel is coming from and what processes are used in the model. And again, it's up to do I have that information on a good enough level. So not all materials are equal. They are coming from different places and they are coming with different processes. So this is one of the challenges with the complexity is making sure or not making sure but trying to go backwards enough in the supply chain that you can be as accurate as possible where it's coming from sometimes making your own data then from that. Another challenge is that you have development of products and you have new materials then that also then need to have studies with them about what are the processes to develop that. I talked about rare earths and there's one study that is used and there's new studies coming out now that are being integrated into databases. But really if you model it you're really only modeling from one mine in China and what they know from that one mine in China. So you might have one that you wanna see is it different if it's coming from Australia is it different if it's coming from a different source. So this is also part of the complexity that it's a constant challenge to update these databases and to have them have choices that can show some of these differences in the supply chains. And the last challenge is after doing all of this effort to make this giant model it will always not be entirely correct. It will always be wrong but it will hopefully be useful as we can see that it is useful to have a sense for what might lead to lower impacts. It's useful to have a sense how big those impacts are and where they are in there but they will never be 100% accurate because of all of these complexities that I described towards compiling an LCA together. And that is what note I'm gonna leave on because James is gonna go into the deep dive probably the best way to learn about LCA is reviewing a lot of them and finding out about the wild world of LCA. So I hand it over to you, James. Thanks, Jessica. Just before we dive into what kind of our exploration of LCA's we've got a few questions from the chat for you, Jessica. So the first comes from Mr. C who asks are the databases open to the public or do you have to pay for them? Good question. The most comprehensive ones you have to pay for. So like EcoInvent, Dami also has one with their software. There is one, the ELCD is public and there is an open source software open LCA as well. But again, they're not as full or as comprehensive because part of what companies like EcoInvent are doing is compiling all the time, reading the latest studies, putting in new choices or updated information. So that's kind of why it is. And it's quite expensive. I think last time I looked it was nearly 4,000 euros for a license for EcoInvent. So this is another part of the challenge. There are open source ones but it's limited in what you can do for some simple things. I have my students use the open source but we only model a plastic bottle. So it's okay for that. And it's okay to get a rough sense of things but it won't have everything in it, the open source yet. But maybe we keep working on those two. Yeah, we did look into EcoInvent and decided we just couldn't afford the license. So yeah, from Benjamin a question aside from materials, have you been looking at human activities like the travel activity and software development activities of computer manufacturing, all the emissions that are from humans learning and studying and building stuff? And then kind of Erica added that she's heard that some LCA methodologies are beginning to look at combining social and ethical considerations too. Yep, this is true. So I'm talking about environmental LCA's which will combine let's say or take into account then any kind of transportation, yes, any kind of energy use, yes, depending on where you're drawing your boundaries. But yeah, if it's using energy or there's transport you always have transport actually as part of your life cycle as well. So that is in an LCA, the back and forth in it. So yeah, I did just put, okay, we go from the materials to the use stage but these materials are moving and you do take that into account in the LCA for sure. But the social side of things would be a social LCA where you're really focused on the social side of things. Yeah, and there are social LCA's so you can do a social LCA with an environmental LCA and then you have more called a sustainability assessment not just an environmental assessment. Perfect, and then the final thing again for Mr. C who just wants to do some clarification I think asking for example, is the lithium in a phone likely to be from the same mine or is it even more, or is it even that complex? I guess referring to the standard I'll say there. Yeah, lithium and see some of these materials it gets hard when they're processed even for electronics manufacturers to know exactly what mine it's coming from. I think this is something that Fairphone has really shown the industry that you can go really back to the mine and find out what mine comes from but often they're sourcing it from maybe even smelters or the processors is where they're buying the materials from and the processors then are buying from someplace. So they have trouble sometimes verifying exactly what mine it is. That's part of what Fairphone did with their gold to try to make sure it wasn't coming from artisanal mines but trying to say where their gold came from and certifying it basically as fair trade. But that's something we're just starting to see before it was just the smelter or the processor that they got to and then they're making assumptions about where it comes from, what they have data on who studied a lithium mine but it won't be specific to exactly what different sources of lithium might come from. So usually it's the biggest source of lithium that they will have in the database and smaller sources not as much. Amazing. Perfect, thank you Jessica for that whistle-stop tour. And we can keep talking and I see that there's some other people also in the crowd that are modeling plastic models and other things. So have my level of knowledge. So I think when we open it up if you have something that you want to add to what I've said, I'm very humble that I do not know everything in this topic. So when we get to that open session please feel free to also share your experiences. Perfect, speaking of that open session we are running slightly behind so I will try and get through the next bit reasonably quickly to allow us some time for questions but I'll say now that we can keep this room open longer than planned so we can go on past what would it be, eight o'clock UK time, nine p.m. European time. Obviously I'm aware that some people may have to leave. So I'll press on but it may be that the big discussion comes kind of around the time we would do to finish and we may finish a little later for those that can stick around. So without further ado, let me get on with the next bit. So maybe thinking now after Jessica's introduction why on earth did we decide to dive head first into this world with very little prior knowledge about how it all works. And so the main reason, let me share my screen. There we go. We knew instinctively obviously as a repair organisation that repair is good for the environment, repair is green especially when it comes to what to do with a broken device of some kind, if you have to screen your phone smashes repairing it is much green than buying a new one but we wanted to quantify this a little bit or get some understanding of exactly what that impact is what is the difference between buying any phone and throwing your old one away compared to fixing your phone and continuing to use it for longer. We also wanted to understand this difference so that we knew exactly what to prioritize how to motivate volunteers and how to educate people about the impact of the products that we buy every day that we don't often see impacts of producing things tend to be quite hidden to us. And we wanted to kind of expose this area a little bit more. And finally, we've worked out that being able to demonstrate this kind of impact can also help community groups kind of secure funding as well as kind of motive volunteers and brag more about the work that they're doing. And finally, it helps us make a stronger case for the right to repair if we have a better understanding of the difference that repairable devices can make to carbon emissions, which is a particularly topical issue at the moment. Then that will help us hopefully secure laws that make products easy to repair in the future. But when we started looking for this data originally we were hoping someone would have already got to this point and we could just simply use that data and apply it to our own work. But unfortunately, we couldn't find anybody we couldn't find any open databases not just LCA data but actual kind of product data that we could use being non-experts in LCA we didn't necessarily have the expertise to just dive straight in and do our own LCA analysis for all the reasons that Jessica has mentioned it's a very potentially complex world. And frankly, we have other things that are kind of higher on the priority list. That said, we did decide to dive head in and try and see what data we could find from industry, from academia, from public bodies and other places. We first attempted this back in 2014 when we first built our fix on the tool. Back then, data was even more limited than it is now but we did find some information on some devices and that's what we've been using up until this point to estimate our environmental impact from the pair events. But that was seven years ago and things have changed quite a lot. Just as one example, the way that laptops have been manufactured has changed significantly. For now, lighter, there are more things sold on to motherboard and the seven components have become smaller. And so the data that we had is a little out of date. And so we wanted to update the data that we had. We wanted to get more of it so that we would have more robust sources of data. And we also wanted to expand the range of devices that we could perform these calculations on. We've added various new categories over the last few years and we wanted to be able to perform calculations through this as well, including for non-electronic products. So we asked our community for help and six very brave volunteers stepped forward, six citizen scientists to help us with this work and from various different backgrounds. None of us experts in LSA analysis, but all of us keen and with a wide variety of skill sets that have come in quite useful later on. Spoiler alert, as you can probably imagine, it wasn't easy. So, oh, that's a little screenshot of our previous data just to give you a sense of the kind of quality and availability of the data that we had previously. You can see a lot of red and orange on that table indicating the data wasn't necessarily the highest quality or we couldn't find a huge amount of it for these different devices. So we did start looking and this table shows you more or less what we found. So from left to right, you can see the availability of data that we found for various different categories of product. Initially, looking at the right hand side, we had some success with computing devices in particular and we've got most of this data from the manufacturers themselves. So places like Apple or Dell or HP, come back to some of those later. These manufacturers provide product carbon footprint reports and these are kind of very basic summaries of the full LCA report that Jessica mentioned earlier. They tend to focus purely on the greenhouse gas and part of the LCA report providing a CO2 equivalent measurement and ignoring all the other measurements. So we gathered quite a lot of data for laptops, desktop computers, smartphones, monitors. You can see the list on screen now. But we found it much harder for a lot of other products. So if you look kind of on the left hand side of that table, you'll see that we really struggled to find data for things like coffee makers, sewing machines, even TVs, paper shredders, blenders, these kinds of products, which we really struggled to find much data on these at all actually. Many companies that we looked at did seem to have this data. They bragged about it in their corporate sustainability reports to their shareholders, but then didn't publish the data. So Samsung being a notable example throughout their corporate sustainability report. Talking about how great LCA data is and then apparently doing nothing with it in the public. So we did Pesta, a number of companies sending emails to try and see if they would give us some of the data that they hadn't seen to publish on the website. With no luck, we didn't really have any success with any of the companies that contacted. So we turned to academia, looking for relevant LCA papers in the literature. Obviously we encountered a few barriers to this. A lot of these papers are behind paywalls. A lot of publishers don't let you access this paper unless you pay for access to the journal. Fortunately, one of our volunteers was a student at university and so we were able to ask her to look for a lot of the resources that we thought would be useful. And so that's how we found the majority of our academic papers. And we did find a large body of research, but not all of it was relevant or applicable for a lot of the reasons that Jessica went into before. Either the studies were designed for different purposes or use different metrics and they weren't necessarily all that compatible with the kind of product carbon footprint data that we'd already found. So we had to be quite careful about which data we selected from academia. We also found that a lot of it was older data. We struggled to find much data from the last kind of five years or so compared to previously. Finally, we also got some data from public bodies, notably the French Environment Ministry, a demo which had quite a rich source of data on their website. And that's how we found all the data that you can see in that table. But we quickly ran into a second issue which was the format of the data that we found. So all of the data that we got tended to be in PDF format, which is great if you want to print it out and read it or read through it on a screen, but not so great if you want to copy and paste information into a spreadsheet or a database. So to give you an example of what we were up against, this is a product carbon footprint report from HP on one of their recent notebooks. So this is a typical of a kind of report that we would find. We found about 1,400 of these reports from various different companies about different products. So we had to manually, basically, copy and paste little bits of information from these reports into a master spreadsheet where we were compiling everything, which for 1,400 PDF documents, you can imagine, took a while and we encountered some other challenges too. So let me just draw your attention to this particularly wonderful pie chart from HP. And if we zoom in on that a little bit, you should be able to see that while it's a great pie chart in many respects, it breaks down all the elements of this laptop into different components, different phases of its life, but it does not provide any values for the percentages. So to get any kind of real measurements put into the spreadsheet required us to literally measure the angles of different segments of this pie chart and then copy that into the spreadsheet, which was, quite frankly, a real pain. So this is the corrected version after our kind of measurement analysis. So we combined all the different components of the battery, such as battery, chassis, et cetera. And so we now know that the pre-use elements, so that's the manufacturer, the transport, totaled about 88% of the total greenhouse gas emissions for this laptop use was about 11% and the end of life was just under 1%. So this is all to say, it took us a while to compile all this data. Particularly as we were only seven people and having 1400 of these documents to work through, we're not easy. Before I go on, are there any questions about how we found the data so far or shall I press on? I don't see any in the chat at the moment. So I think now that you've asked the question, maybe we'll get a few, but if you press on, I can bring them to your attention. Perfect, okay, that sounds good. Okay, so let me move on to what we found the results. So I mentioned that we found data on about 1400 products, but due to the difficulties that I've just mentioned, we were only able to extract data on about 500 of those products in terms of CO2 equivalent data and data about the weight of those products on about 825 and that covered about 60 different product categories, mostly consumer electronics, but also household electricals, like kettles or posters, as well as some unpowered items for the first time, like clothes and furniture. Most of those categories of product are based on the open repair data standard, which I know some of you will be familiar with, but not everyone. So this is a standard that we have drawn up with our partners in the open repair alliance, like Rebecca Fahey Foundation and Shifton Fixit Clinic. And as a standardized way of recording repair data at repair events, as the data is compatible with the tools and methodologies for all those different networks around the world. But let me just cut the chase. So this was perhaps one of the biggest results that we found, which is that for surprisingly high number of the product categories we looked at, the majority of the carbon impact occurs before they were used for the first time. So in this table, in this graph, sorry, you can see that for all the products up until vacuum cleaner, more than 50% of the total carbon impact of these products occurs before they ever switched on for the first time. This isn't true for every device, so you can see vacuum cleaners, kettles, toasters fall significantly below that threshold. But actually, once we pair this data with the typical devices that we see at repair events, we can tell that for most of the items we see at repair events, the carbon impact is bigger before the device, the biggest before the product owner uses it for the first time. We have a question right here from Benjamin Balderac about what makes the blender so extreme? Do you have any insight into why blenders? That's a great question, Benjamin. Yeah, I'm not entirely sure. I think it's probably related to the motor, primarily, but the blender category does sometimes include some of the more complex types of blender. So some types of food processor also contain chips, for example. They're kind of semi-computerized devices, and that will significantly add some kind of carbon footprint to these devices during manufacture. Yeah, we have David also say, or Claire, sorry, if it's because most of the time they're not on, they're not powered, they're sitting around, and you only use them for maybe a few minutes. Yeah, and we have David saying the same thing. They do not get used for many hours per the week. If we think about other things that we might have plugged in empowering a lot, whereas blenders, I think it's been found drills to, might only be used for 15 minutes in their entire lives. It might be similar, let me see. Exactly, yeah. Thanks for pointing that out. Exactly. Proud not to own a blender. Me too, Elin, me too. So yes, so this is true for most of the products that we see at community repair events. And fundamentally, this is why repair matters so much, actually, so much goes into making our gadgets in the first place that it's really important to keep them in use for as long as possible and avoid using new replacements for these devices where we can. I'm seeing another question by Marlowe here. Yeah, the more energy they use in the use phase, the smaller the percentage of the production phase, right? Yeah, it is relative too. So this is a relative, I would say, James, would you also? 100%, exactly, yeah, yeah. So this is purely the percentage. This is not really a measure of the absolute amount of carbon produced by any of these products. So a kettle, for example, is very energy inefficient. So there's a lot of electricity to boil water. Okay, so moving on, because I'm aware time is marching on. Okay, we can map this out in even more detail. So if we look at the most popular item that we see at community repair events, which is the medium-sized laptop, this one right here. Thanks, Karen. Thanks for coming. Yes, well, actually, before we move on, I have a quick question for everybody. Let me put up a poll real quick. Oh, I seem to have overwritten my poll. Never mind. Maybe post in the chat then, if you're buying a new laptop, how long would you hope your laptop would last? Yes, so Jessica, I think I accidentally changed the question of this quiz earlier. So this isn't quite the question I wanted to ask. Sorry, I'll end that poll. I just read the question now. I was like, oh, but it's here. It's laptop live spent. Yeah, okay, we'll answer that one later. So in the chat, how long would you hope or expect your laptop to last if you're buying a new one in an ideal world? How long would you like it to last? We have five years, 10 years, 10 years, 15 years, 15. Keep posting. I'll come back to this in a sec. Okay, so we looked at 64 models of medium-sized laptop in total from Apple, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Microsoft. And we found that an average laptop of this size produces around 263 kilotech kilograms of CO2 equivalent. Obviously, this comes with all the caveats that we've explored already, that it's very rough approximation. But just to give you some sense of the scale, that's about 260 kilograms. And that's about the same as flying from London to Berlin. And that's the total CO2 across, and that's 81% of the total CO2 that this laptop produces across its entire lifetime. So the vast majority of that CO2 is in production, not during use. Okay, so, but yeah, to work this out, manufacturers had to calculate roughly how long their laptops would last in order to work out how much CO2 would be generated in the use phase of these devices. So this gets us back to the question I just asked. And it looks like most people are answering around 10. It's 10 to 15, and then the low, I think, was four or five. Yeah, but 10 to 15 are the majority of the chat answers here. Okay, yeah, I mean, that's what I would expect too. That's what I would hope for at least 10 years seems like a reasonable expectation to have. Unfortunately, most of the manufacturers we looked at used an estimated lifespan of just four years for their devices when calculating this data. And so if we map out, boo, exactly, exactly. So because we have this four year estimation that allows us to kind of very roughly map out the impact of replacing a laptop every four years, which seems like a lot. So this, again, very roughly is what it looks like replacing a laptop every four years with the usual caveats about, you know, this being an estimate only and administrative primarily. So you can see here that the kind of vertical lines the production of these laptops replaced every four years and the more shallow lines are the kind of use phase of these laptops. So the energy used to charge and so on. And so you can see here that it adds up very quickly. But if we extend the lifespan of a laptop by about 50%, so from four years to six years, you can see here that over time, the overall impact of using these devices will drop because we've only produced three and not four. And then the same is true if we double this estimated lifespan to eight years. And just as a baseline, here's a 16 year laptop. So you can see here, the trend is very clear that the longer we can use a device, over time, the lower the carbon impact is going to be. And this is true, obviously, not just of laptops, but of every single product that we own and fix at community repair events. I think Erica also brings up a comment that she would potentially also have a battery change in there, which we saw actually in the Fairphone example that I put in that, yeah, that is usually part of the assumptions that you would replace some components to. Yeah, absolutely. So this is a very simplified model here. We're not really taking into account the impact of any repairs, for example. And we're assuming a kind of baseline electricity mix. Obviously, if you're using entirely renewable energy, the use phase might be a lot flatter than this, for example. So there are a lot of assumptions going in, but the point really is to kind of illustrate how repair can help reduce the kind of carbon impact that we have over time. So it's really clear then that using devices longer and repairing them when they break does help reduce emissions over time. But this is just data for rough data for one individual laptop. So now imagine that this is true for every laptop that's sold. And you can imagine how quite quickly this scales really rapidly and has the potential to save quite a significant amount of carbon. And actually recently, Ecos released a report called Long Live the Machine that estimated that if we could double the lives of laptops sold just in Europe, we could save the equivalent of about 5 million tons of CO2 by 2030. And that would be like taking 3 million cars off the road. And that's simply using the things we already have for longer. But one of the problems that we're facing is despite the urgent need we have right now to reduce emissions, many manufacturers are actively making repair more difficult. I'm sure a lot of you will have seen these stories. If we had more time, I would go into this. But if you have questions about this, perhaps we can come to it later. So what can we do now? What can we do about this? If you have any suggestions, feel free to post these in the chat. We also have one question in the chat if you want to take it now, James. I can help you with this. Do more modern machines use less power to run and smaller footprint to manufacture? Do you want to answer? Do you want me to answer? I'm happy for you to lead the way on this one. I can share what I know afterwards if you haven't already. Yeah, I mean we do see efficiencies improving in manufacture and efficiencies improving in use too. It really depends on exactly what product it is. And as James was showing, the ratio of the upstream, the production phase versus the use phase. So when I was modeling light bulbs, yes, it did make sense still with the increasing efficiencies of LEDs to switch them out most of the time except for certain use scenarios if you weren't using it that often, if you were using it in a decarbonized energy mix. So here in Sweden, it actually made sense to use it longer even if you had increasing efficiencies. But it has to be really fast development of that product. And we see over time that those developments of efficiency slow down, there's learning curves to them. So there's a few studies and the academic studies kind of looking at the break even point. So it is both like as your energy mix is becoming cleaner, you want longer lifetimes. As your efficiencies gains are slowing down, you also want to keep your products longer. And it's only these types of products that are in that category. As James was showing you, all those products on the left side that have their production phase being the biggest part are always going to be for extending lifetimes regardless of the efficiency because the use stage is just the lower part of the overall impact. That's yep. I cannot have put it better myself. Perfect. I will also add though perhaps that in our research we come across an academic research that was investigating both this issue but also the issue, the question of repair and whether the impact of repair makes it kind of more actually better to buy replacement, a more efficient replacement as opposed to repair and older in more inefficient one. And they looked at I think nine different categories of product and found that for 95% of the most common repairs for these products, it was actually still better to repair it rather than buy a more efficient replacement. So as a rule of thumb, it is fair to say in most cases that it is better to repair an existing device or machine than replace it. There are exceptions, but as a general rule, yeah, repair still is better. Think about whether it's a device that's on all the time, like refrigerators, and then how much more efficient the model you would buy is really if there's significant efficiencies, maybe. Yeah, but it really depends on those constraints. We have a few questions here, James too about how confident you feel about the 263 kilogram CO2 equivalent that it is correct. Yeah, it's a good question. It's, well, I mean, it's not correct in absolute terms because of all the reasons that kind of Jessica went through when she was introducing LCA's, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to really be precise about this. So what we have done really is we've taken 64 different models of medium-sized laptops, so as similar as we can make them. And we've only compared product carbon footprints for these devices. Those tend to use more or less the same methodology for the same purposes. And so although it's not really useful to compare two individual products because the margin of error is big enough that any difference would be within that margin of error. But the hope is that by kind of combining 64 different devices, we can come up with a very approximate value for this type of device. So 263, it sounds more precise than it is. It's a rule of thumb. It's a guideline. Yeah, I mean, I hope that helps. But it's not entirely arbitrary. It does come from, does come from manufacturing. And I will say, I think there was a comment, a part of that comment also about energy uses in China with the, remembering that when you're modeling, you are actually modeling the energy mix in China for the manufacturing as much as you know was manufactured in China. So that is accounted for different processes. And again, as those processes are made more efficient, it then is updating those databases to reflect the true emissions from those processes and where they are. So as global value change shift, the databases are also trying to take that into account and having those different sources available. But yeah, that's again the data, how much data you can get that is specific to and how much you know about the supply chain. It was mentioned here that often manufacturers don't know beyond the component level. And that's true. Perfect. Okay. I'll press on and then perhaps we'll have more time for questions at the end. I'm aware some people probably need to leave because we are running a little bit over. So earlier I asked for some suggestions for things that we can do. And I spotted a couple of really excellent suggestions from people, including signing our petition, which I see John has shared. Thank you for that, John. And of course, yes, a lot of the suggestions that we saw are correct. So Claire had some great ones, sign a petition, get your MP to sign in my state declaration. Obviously join your local paraphernalia event. If you're in Malmo or Lund, go and say hi to Jessica. Go to her paraphernalia there. We run them in London. And these are happening all over the UK, Europe, and around the world. And so these are great ways to meet people, improve your repair skills, and fix your broken things, and help the scale impact at the community level. But obviously, as we've been talking about petitions and so on, the right to repair is also really important. And for us, this is where the scale really happens. So I mentioned the ECOS report earlier saying that we have the potential to reduce, to save millions of tons of CO2. By making up tops easy to replace and this can only really happen through legislation. So the right to repair campaign, pictures of which you can see on the screen now, is a really great way to do this. That's if you had to repair.eu, you can learn all about that campaign. Yep. So I think probably I'll move on super quickly now just to our final lessons and then we'll have some more questions and then we can wrap up. So the lessons I wanted to share are that a lot of companies really don't publish much of this data at all. A lot of companies also don't take into account things like scope three emissions when they're calculating their impact. So it's not necessarily surprising. Those who do publish this kind of data often do so reluctantly and don't label their pie charts, for example, which is frustrating. A lot of the ones that do publish this data seem to do so to achieve some kind of eco label. Such as EP, for example. So they can kind of put an eco label on their products that the consumer might not necessarily understand. And so I've mentioned that some of the companies that do this quite well, such as Apple, sometimes retroactively change all of their previously published data if they decide that there's a new methodology they want to try, for example, that might make them look a little better. So they've done this once or twice in the past. So we have to be a little bit careful when trusting the data that comes from manufacturers directly. As I mentioned, it's also important to remember that this data is not useful for making individual purchasing decisions. So it's not really useful for deciding should I buy A or B based on its carbon footprint. Rather it's useful for understanding trends as I've mentioned. So the amount of carbon that's produced as part of the production of a particular device as opposed to the youth, for example. And it's useful for demonstrating impacts at scale. So the Ecos report that I mentioned, for example, allows us to predict what would happen if that looks easy to repair, for example. It's interesting to note that we are starting to see some companies try and use carbon labelling, such as Logitech, for example. As a way of informing you how much, what the carbon footprint of the device of purchasing is, and maybe it would be good to have a discussion about this in a few minutes about whether this is actually something that's useful to help us make informed purchasing decisions or whether it's kind of an attempt to shift responsibility for those emissions onto consumers rather than manufacturers. Maybe that's a discussion we can have. And then the final point I want to mention is that all the data I've been talking about is public. We publish it all so anyone can access it. I put a link in the chat. So you're more than welcome to look at the data yourself, see exactly what we found, see how we've put it all together, look at the original sources that we've used, and have a good explore. The data is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Details are in the spreadsheet itself. So it's free to reuse this data if that's something you want to do. But do let us know. We're interested to know how the data can be useful for people. So let us know if you want to reuse it. Okay, I think we should open the floor to questions. Does anyone have any extra questions that we haven't already discussed? I think there was one comment before too about software also being part of what impedes repair there. And I think this is something that restart is also in the right to repair campaign is also making visible that it's not just the hardware that becomes obsolete, but also we have software obsolescence and we need support software, not just spare parts for hardware, but also software support too. 100%. Yep, fully agreed. I'm actually related to software. One of the new threats we're seeing to repair is some manufacturers starting to use part pairing to make it more difficult to swap out parts. So software locks almost on different physical components of a device. So a recent example is the iPhone 12. For example, if you buy two new brand new iPhone 12s, identical, you take them apart, you swap the camera modules for the iPhones, then turn them back on. The camera won't work properly because the camera module itself is paired to the chip of the phone. So physically there's nothing wrong with the camera, but because of a software lock, you can't really repair it unless you go through Apple. You have the software to repair these components. So that's just one of the examples of kind of making repair more difficult that we're seeing. How are we doing for questions? Okay, we've got a few questions. Also some of the suggestions for actions. Mr. C, not to understate how good an idea this is, is it worth using total emissions to give context for any reductions? So, and I'm trying to think about what the context is here. For how much of those reductions actually relate to the total, then putting it in perspective, I think that that's always a good idea to, Helen would like a spreadsheet that can tell whether someone should keep their car or buy newer. I have made this for a colleague of mine too. And again, it depends on the, unfortunately it isn't like, is your car this old? It is also like, what are you going to buy instead? Are you going to buy an electric? Yes, you should replace. Are you going to buy an old 12 year old? No, you shouldn't replace. So it gets very, very specific. But I think you're right that this could help maybe, at least a discussion of some of these, but I find whenever I'm talking to people, they get confused fast too. But I think as James was saying, having also a sheet on products that it always makes sense, like no matter what, there are these ones that are brought out like cars, like light bulbs that confuse people or refrigerators, where they think, okay, because there is kind of a reason to switch these over in certain cases, right? But it would be, I think it is maybe communicating, these ones that have their upstream or their production phase as having the highest impact. This is also closed, this is also furniture. It always makes sense to extend the lifetime of those kind of products. So it's only these ones that are on all the time or have high use stage impacts that you get into this, should I replace it or should I extend the lifetime? It's only those ones, but there are so many products, as James was showing us, that it's no brainer on extending the lifetime for them. Absolutely. And it's also worth remembering that this evening, we're only talking about CO2, about carbon, about greenhouse gases. And when it comes to manufacturing products, even if it's things like fridges, for example, that are on all the time, there's a lot more that goes into making a fridge than processes that release CO2. So there's the use of different resources or critical raw materials, for example, and the various social and environmental impacts that result from the extraction of those resources in different parts of the world, as well as the working conditions of the people putting it together and so on. So we've been focusing on a very specific area this evening, which is CO2. But if you want to kind of zoom out a little bit, there's a whole range of other impacts that we could also discuss. This is true. So also with carbon, when I'm talking about these high-use stage, there is a trade-off then, because you're going for what would be the carbon-saving option by replacing with an efficiency, but that's a trade-off then with the material depletion and some other environmental impacts, as James is saying. So it isn't always a win-win. It's a trade-off and it's being made prioritizing carbon over some of those other environmental impacts because you can lessen a lot of definitely the resource-related and anything that's impact-related to your production there. We're still going with the cars I see in the chat. What we should do and can you get converted? I have actually heard of new pilot projects trying to basically refurbish cars, but they're in pilot stage. Maybe other people know more about this because that's all I know, but I think that that's also a cool idea. Okay, can we change things over with the part of it that needs to be changed to and keep some parts intact? And LCA can help with that, as we saw with strategies. Does it do we actually end up with lower environmental impact at the end? Perfect. Okay, are there any other questions or? Erica says, thanks for the guidance for design engineers on this. Oh, that's great to hear Erica. I think we've got people in our, in our, our women are here who know more about some of these things we're getting into now. So it's great if you share links and are seeing the questions in the chat and helping because that's, other people really do know even more. So it's great to see. It's worth mentioning. As John mentioned, we will be emailing out some of these useful links as a kind of post event email. So we'll make sure that everyone gets some of those. If you do want to continue the conversation, we have a forum and I posted the links that in the chat, which will also include the email. And you're welcome to head on there and continue any conversations that have been started. We're both on the forum, so you can tag us and then we'll see. Or if you saw somebody here who knew something, maybe they're in the forum too. So you can connect through the forum and find that person to talk a bit further. Exactly. Perfect. Okay. And I have to do one final thing before we wrap up. And that is this. So before we move on, I just have to say a quick thank you to our funder. So this work was funded by the Action Project, which in turn was the funding from the EU Horizon 2020 program. Perfect. So thank you so much for coming. Before you head off, I wanted to share that we are running a second webinar similar to this in October. And this webinar will focus on consumption emissions. So there was a question earlier about contextualizing the emission savings in the context of the UK, for example. So that second webinar will be all about contextualizing emissions in the context of national emissions or international emissions and so on. So stay tuned for news on that. Finally, well, penultimately actually, I want to just mention that we are a small nonprofit. So a lot of this work that we do is funded by Charcoal Trusts and Foundations, but we also rely on donations from people such as yourselves. So if you're feeling generous, feel free to head to our donate page and give anything you can, no pressure. And finally, we have a quick survey. I will send this out by email as well. And I would really appreciate any responses to that survey. It would be great to hear your thoughts, especially as we plan the second webinar. We'll take on board any feedback from tonight and any questions you still have. So please do share your thoughts through the survey there. Again, I'll email these links out tomorrow. But thank you so much, everyone, for coming. I hope it's been interesting. And I'm massive thanks to Jessica for sharing her time and expertise with us this evening. My pleasure. And it was great seeing all the knowledge shared in the chat as well. Thank you, everyone, for participating. Thank you, everybody. Bye.