Target Group: Electronics

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Details

There are more than 170.000 SMEs in the European electrical and electronics sector, making this sector one of the backbones of the European economy. The electronics sector comprises a huge variety of companies from manufacturing services, assemblers, system integrators, engineering companies, retailers, electrical installation and repair shops.

European SMEs are in their majority suppliers to other manufacturers; only very few manufacture, assemble or design end products. The SMEs in this sector serve a multitude of other branches, such as industrial applications (control and automation), the automotive sector, infrastructure / transportation, aviation, medical equipment, and several more.
However, the end consumer market (consumer electronics, information and communication technology) with very few exceptions is the domain of suppliers from Asian countries.

In the end consumer market typically environmental arguments count most and serve as a distinction in the market place. In all other sectors typically costs and performance clearly dominate, and a low environmental impact does not add much benefit in customer relations.
This also explains, why electronics are subject to environmental considerations, but European SMEs are rarely affected yet by the related requirements. The legislative requirements in Europe shifted much of the "environmental attention" to substance restrictions and replacing certain metals and flame retardants. This leads to numerous activities regarding material declarations and material data management throughout the supply chain, dominating also the requirements of SMEs regarding environmental data.

Energy consumption in the use phase, i.e. energy efficiency in particular, gained more importance in recent years, pushed by the developments under the European ecodesign Directive and the general discussion about rising energy costs, and global warming.
Life cycle assessments in the abridged version of Product Carbon Footprint calculations became popular in recent years, but again rather as an activity of large brandname OEMs , covering also the component level in some cases, such as Dell, Fujitsu, Samsung, Apple and Intel.