Assessing the impacts of computer reuse for digital inclusion from product information

Computer reuse is promoted as a strategy to reduce environmental impact, create local employment, and provide digital access. However, the development of sustainability indicators to inform policy has remained limited. This is due to the lack of empirical data on device lifespans and regional context, which forces Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) practitioners to rely on generic assumptions that limit the accuracy of impact estimations. This study addressed these gaps by developing an LCA-based calculation criterion designed to integrate multiple parameters using device-level data. The criterion is specifically tailored to provisioning scenarios targeting digitally excluded communities and was partially applied using a Dataset and lifespans of 710 refurbished devices from the eReuse initiative in Spain. Three provisioning scenarios (single user, two users with reuse, two users with new devices) were evaluated for Spain and extrapolated to South Africa and Sweden with contrasting electricity mixes to quantify the influence of energy in use. Reuse proved more advantageous than supplying new devices in terms of GWP per hour of digital access, and a one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis showed that the magnitude of this benefit is highly sensitive to device lifespans and electricity emission factors. Future integration of digital product information into LCA is expected to enhance the precision of sustainability indicators used to inform policy.