Task 1.4 Project environmental impact monitoring

EECONE presents a very high ambition regarding environmental impact. Putting in place methodologies and technologies to reduce environmental impact of electronic waste is very important and relevant in our time. In the meantime, as for any technology, it is important to understand environmental footprint of the development of these new techniques to be sure that the quest for solutions remains a small cost compared to expected benefits.

This task will assess the impact of the execution of the EECONE project. For this purpose, we ambition to rely on averaged data that are getting available from the scientific community to provide estimates of the environmental footprint of the project. GHG (GreenHouse Gas) will be of course an important output, but we will also try to estimate the environmental footprint of the project with respect to the main environmental factors.

The entire EECONE project is dedicated to E-waste reduction, in other words reduction of environmental footprint of the technologies considered in the project. We are used to quantify the return to investment of projects in terms of employees creation, or the possible revenue that will produce the developed technologies.

In Task 1.4, An important milestone will be the development of a methodology and pertinent indicators that could relate the environmental footprint performance of the project. It could be the ratio of the expected environmental footprint reduction over the environmental footprint of the project execution. The higher the indicator, the more beneficial the project is for the environment.

In practice, all partners will be asked to complete periodically an excel sheet to declare their main activities in specific and predefined categories. Complementary data at project level will also be collected (Email, share point, website...). With the data gathered, a consolidated environmental footprint of the project will be collected and consolidated in a deliverable. We will report on this during the project, trying also to highlight hot spots and promote best practices based on real experience. At the end of the project, based on the output of the project, the indicator will be produced and reported in deliverables. With all the data collected, we will also be able to analyse, within the project which activities produced the larger environmental footprints. INP-Gre will be leading this activity for the whole project. CNRS will help supervising this task. All partners will be asked to participate, -sharing data to carry on the estimates.

Based on the active participation of all partners, these metrics monitored all along the project execution will be an interesting outcome as a reference for future projects.