Steering Innovation toward Sustainable Electrochromic Displays: A Prospective Life Cycle Assessment Study

Printed electrochromic displays (ECDs) have promising applications in visual communications. A cradle-to-gate ex-ante prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted on six ECD architectures to uncover the environmental implications of material and technological choices. Several materials were considered in ECD fabrication, including silver, carbon, and indium tin oxide (ITO) electrodes, plastic- and paper-based substrates, and two electrolytes. The architectures differed in technology maturity levels, ranging from pilot-scale and lab-scale prototypes to conceptual designs. Regardless of their technological maturity, all architectures were scaled up to emulate impact burdens as if they were produced on an optimized industrial production scale. The analysis of ECD architectures at the early development stage, especially conceptual designs, determines their environmental viability without the need for experimental testing, resulting in significant savings of time and resources. The all-silver architecture was associated with the highest environmental impacts across all endpoint and midpoint indicators, except for the water consumption indicator. On the other hand, the all-carbon architecture exhibited the lowest environmental impacts, followed by the carbon-ITO architecture and all-ITO architecture. Based on the environmental impact results, we could identify ECD architectures that merit further development and those that have limited potential for improvement, thus recommending to cease research and development of ECD architectures employing silver electrodes. The approach employed in this LCA guides scaling-up and predicting the environmental impacts of conceptual ECD architectures. This may benefit LCA practitioners and researchers engaged in ex-ante prospective LCA studies. Furthermore, the findings of this LCA might be applicable to other electronic devices, where silver, ITO, and carbon could be interchangeably used as electrodes.