Embodied-Energy Amortization Lab

Product Type

Consumption Levers

Base lifespan L₀ 3.0 yr

Repair rate r 20%

Recycling recovery ρ 15%

Live Readouts

Embodied energy E₀

50.0 kWh

Effective lifespan

3.6 yr

Annualized energy cost

13.9 kWh/yr

Savings vs. unrepaired, unrecycled baseline

How it works

Every product carries an embodied energy E₀ — the sum of extraction, manufacturing and end-of-life processing energy paid once when it's made (First Law: energy only changes form, ΔU = Q + W, and none of it vanishes when the phone leaves the factory). What actually matters for sustainable consumption isn't E₀ alone, it's how many years of service you get out of it:

L_eff  = L0 · (1 + r · k)                 (repair extends effective lifespan)
E_life = E0 · (1 − ρ · η)                 (recycling recovers a share of embodied energy)
E_annual = E_life / L_eff                  (annualized energy cost, kWh per year of use)

where r is the fraction of failures that get repaired instead of discarded (each repair adds a fixed extension factor k = 0.8), and ρ is the fraction of the item that's recycled at end-of-life with recovery efficiency η = 0.6 of the original extraction energy.

Base lifespan slider — how long the product lasts before its first failure with zero repair.
Repair rate — raising it stretches the pipeline's "Use" stage and lowers E_annual, since the same E₀ is now amortized over more years.
Recycling recovery — raising it dims the one-way flow into "Extraction" for the next unit and feeds a visible return loop back from End-of-Life, cutting the energy the next cycle needs from scratch.
The glowing particles along the pipeline move at a rate proportional to the current E_annual — a slower, dimmer stream literally means less energy burned per year of service.

This is the physics behind why "buy less, keep it longer, repair it, recycle it" outperforms "buy the greenest-labelled replacement every year" — a low L_eff dominates the ratio no matter how efficient the manufacturing process was.

Embodied-energy flow Recycling recovery loop

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