Lifecycle Assessment of a Virtual Reality Headset

A cradle-to-gate life-cycle assessment of a 450 g VR headset, examining manufacturing energy, metal sourcing, logistics, and environmental trade-offs against a smartphone baseline.

Project details

• Applied an ISO 14040/14044 screening life-cycle assessment framework with defined system boundaries and scenario-based modeling.
• Compared four manufacturing scenarios combining High Impact Electric Power or Low Impact Electric Power with primary or 100% recycled metal sourcing.
• Analyzed the environmental contribution of semiconductor wafer fabrication, metallic components, and distribution logistics, including the shift in hotspots caused by the headset's lack of a large touchscreen.
• Evaluated aluminum, copper, gold, and silver sourcing with EPS2015 and LIME2 weighting methods, focusing on circularity, resource depletion, toxicity, and damage costs.
• Compared the headset's manufacturing profile with Sony Z5/Z3 smartphone life-cycle data and assessed climate change, energy demand, acidification, and eutrophication indicators.
• Found that the optimized recycled-metal and low-impact-electricity scenario reduced modeled cradle-to-gate global warming potential from 55 kg to 25 kg CO2e.
• Concluded that decarbonized semiconductor fabrication and material circularity, especially secondary gold sourcing, are high-impact strategies for reducing VR hardware impacts.

Technologies