Material declaration and recycling description

To make a material declaration is not a difficult undertaking. The main difficulty is to collect the information on materials for purchased components. Gathering material information from producers of standard components can be difficult. 

To get material information on electronics can be especially difficult, e.g. because the materials in the electronic component are confidential. 

If you want to make one (or only a few) material declarations, manual handling of data will be sufficient but if you want to make material declarations for all of your products and update them when components change, a system for handling the information should be established. Within such a system it should be natural for purchasers to request material information from suppliers. 

Three examples on how Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia have tried to solve the problem of communicating material data with suppliers are linked below.

• Ericsson 
• Motorola 
• Nokia

To make a recycling description requires somewhat more work than a material declaration, but one can use the material information gathered  when making a material declaration as a starting point for a recycling description. 

Under Tools & methods there are more 

• examples of material declarations

• examples of recycling descriptions 

Business value
Developing material declaration and/or recycling description for a product can be a cost efficient way of showing that a company is working with product related environmental issues and might be sufficient for answering environmental questions from customers.