Aligned Incentives Chief Strategy Officer, Dr. Sarah Boyd, will participate in “Electronics Goes Green 2024+” in Berlin this June. This premier sustainability conference brings together global industry practitioners, researchers, and policymakers in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. Sarah will present a paper on addressing data gaps in life cycle assessments (LCA) and contribute to the workshop on Product Category Rules (PCR) for ICT equipment.
Electronics Goes Green is the world’s leading electronics and environment conference organized by Fraunhofer IZM. It aims to advance sustainability in electronics and ICT and promote eco-friendly practices throughout the industry’s value chain. Held every four years, this conference shares the latest scientific research, practical innovations, policy, and industry initiatives. This year, it will cover topics ranging from the environmental impacts of technologies and materials to LCA practices and circular economy strategies.
Sarah will present the paper “The State of Electronics LCI Data: How to Address the Data Gaps,” co-authored with collaborators at Microsoft and WSP, in the conference session “LCA Tools and Databases”.
The demand for reliable electronics LCA data has grown among technology companies to support their activity-based Scope 3 accounting, science-based targets, and GHG mitigation strategies. A lack of current and aligned life cycle inventory (LCI) background data for key components can lead to discrepancies in electronics LCA results, which can carry over into corporate-level understanding of Scope 3 GHG mitigation priorities.
In the presentation, Sarah will highlight the opportunity to shift from outdated life cycle inventory datasets to newer data coming from IMEC’s Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems (SSTS) cross-industry partnership. She will provide a user’s guide to SSTS’s publicly available tool that provides more representative semiconductor manufacturing process data to inform effective LCA and decarbonization strategies.
Read the extended paper abstract and download the presentation slides 🡲
In addition to her paper presentation, Sarah will take part in the workshop “Consultation: Towards Ambitious LCA Product Category Rules for ICT Equipment.”
Fraunhofer IZM has been leading the development of new ICT Product Category Rules (PCR) to enhance the comparability of LCA results and promote sustainable product designs and supply chains. They will share the draft PCR for laptops and desktop computers in this workshop for discussion.
Sarah will speak about the challenges and best practices of LCA in ICT and provide feedback on the draft PCR, contributing to the broader discussion on improving life cycle assessment modeling for ICT devices.
Sarah’s participation in “Electronics Goes Green 2024+” underscores Aligned Incentives‘ commitment to accelerating sustainability in the ICT industry through technology innovation. We are proud to contribute to the global dialogue on greener electronics and look forward to the insights and advancements from this conference.
Dr. Sarah Boyd is the Chief Strategy Officer of Aligned Incentives and has spent her career using life cycle assessment (LCA) to drive strategic decision-making in the corporate world. Prior to joining Aligned Incentives, she led product carbon footprinting for new product introductions at Apple and managed engagement with IMEC’s Sustainable Semiconductor Technologies and Systems partnership to drive carbon reductions in semiconductor fabrication. As a senior consultant with Sphera and thinkstep, Sarah led over 100 product sustainability and sustainability strategy projects with clients across ICT, electrical utilities, aerospace, construction and consumer products sectors. As a member of the GaBi Content team she led updates of the GaBi US Extension database and contributed to expansion of the GaBi Electronics Extension DB. Her book Life-cycle Assessment of Semiconductors has served as a definitive source of environmental impact data for integrated circuit manufacturing. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley, and a B.S. in Product Design from Stanford University.
