Tech Topic Series: Eco-Design for Circular Electronics Economy, Webinar #5

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iNEMI’s Eco-Design for Circular Electronics Economy is a series of three interactive webinars featuring experts from leading organizations that are doing innovative/beyond-compliance eco-design work. The series will be an avenue for eco-design leaders to showcase their thought processes, strategies, successes and failures. The goal is to capture the best and most innovative practices being used today and to highlight the processes these leaders follow to determine where to focus their eco-design efforts. All webinars will be recorded for broader distribution and exposure. Download an introduction to the series.


Webinar #5
October 14, 2021


Speaker: 

• Nirav Patel, Founder and CEO, Framework
• Download the presentation

Presentation Synopsis

Framework’s Founder and CEO Nirav Patel shared how his company is remaking consumer electronics to respect people and the planet. Framework’s first product is a laptop that is deeply customizable, fully upgradeable and easy to repair while also being thin, light and high-performance.

Most products today are built in a transactional model that creates disposable hardware and leaves consumers with short-lived products. Framework’s core innovation, which is actually a business model innovation, is to think about products as objects in an ecosystem and customers as participants in that ecosystem, not just consumers.

Framework extends longevity through a marketplace, supporting the ecosystem with replacement parts, upgrades, tools and accessories so that consumers can continue to use and upgrade a product as long as they want to. They design for modularity, repairability and upgradeability. Products are made from highly recyclable materials and from post consumer recycled materials, and they are designed to fit consumer needs. For example, the laptop features four expansion card bays that can be configured for whatever ports the buyer would like.

One of the most unique features of the Framework laptop is the ability to get inside the machine. Not only is it easy to “look under the hood,” but there are step-by-step guides with labels and QR codes for the modules used. The laptop is highly repairable — even the main board is repairable and replaceable.

Framework is embracing modularity to enable a long-lived ecosystem rather than creating products as one-off objects.