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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Consumer-oriented interventions to extend smartphones’ service lifetime
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Jan Bieser
  • Yann Blumer
  • Linda Burkhalter
  • René Itten
  • Marilou Jobin
  • Lorenz Hilty
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title Cleaner and Responsible Consumption
Publisher Elsevier
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 2666-7843
Volume 7
Page Range 100074
Date 2022
Abstract Text A promising strategy to reduce smartphones' environmental footprint is to increase their service lifetime, thereby reducing the demand for resource-intensive production of new devices. Most of the existing literature focuses on production-oriented measures, such as improving repairability, but what remains missing is a systematic overview of consumer-oriented interventions to extend smartphones' service lifetime. In this study, we applied the consumer intervention mapping approach by systematically identifying consumer decision situations along the smartphone life cycle and interventions that encourage consumers to make smartphone lifetime-extending decisions. We identify two main mechanisms to achieve lifetime extension: retention by increasing the time during which a user keeps a device, and recirculation by passing on a device to an additional user. Altogether, we identified 26 different types of interventions to induce consumers to make smartphone lifetime-extending decisions and structure these according to consumer-influence techniques, e.g., informing consumers about retention/recirculation options and environmental impacts caused throughout device life cycles, persuading consumers by creating emotional attachment, nudging consumers through product labels for secondhand devices, simplifying execution of lifetime-extending decision options through take-back programs, and incentivizing lifetime-extension through buy-back programs. These interventions' success in achieving lifetime extensions and reducing environmental impacts in practice depends on the degree to which they actually extend smartphones' service lifetime and reduce production of new devices (displacement rate), induction and re-spending effects associated with the interventions, and the interventions’ implementation feasibility, which conflicts of interest in the smartphone ecosystem often challenge.
Free access at DOI
Digital Object Identifier 10.1016/j.clrc.2022.100074
Other Identification Number merlin-id:23548
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