Age of devices and their use for CO2 / ewaste reference data

[neil]

An excellent question from @james on Open Data Day - pulling it into a new thread for discussion:

@james

Re: Updating reference data

I’m looking to update some of our reference data for laptops & desktops.

But before I get stuck in, I have a question:

Presumably for CO2 footprint, it’s useful to have figures for the latest devices on the market because we use this figure to work out how much CO2 we’d save from people not buying new stuff.

But for the weight of the device, would it not be more useful to use figures from older devices, as these are the ones we’re more likely to be fixing? Given devices tend to be getting lighter (especially laptops), using figures from the very newest machines might be unrealistic…

For now, I’ll add newer devices and keep the older ones too.

[neil]

And the reply from Janet:

@Janet

That’s an interesting question. We have a Data Quality Index (DQI) sheet at the VEEEERRY end of that spreadsheet, that explains how we score data.

On some level, it’s up to our discretion to decide how “technically representative” an LCA is. And some priority is given to the “temporal representativeness” (or “freshness”) of the data. But perhaps once we have more data about the ages of devices brought to events, this can be changed. For example, we might find that hifi components are an average of 15 years old.