Sadly, there is no standard data for CO2 emissions in manufacture of consumer electronics and electricals. For many device categories, data is very difficult to come by.
Together with a team of six volunteers and coaching from Circular Ecology, in 2015 we spent over 60 person-hours scouring the internet for data on the pre-use carbon footprint of these 34 device categories. We looked in academic journals, in company CSR reports, on company websites, on Google Scholar, on industry databases, in documents prepared for the EU.
For the handful of categories for which we could not find data, we have created an estimate based on a category of device with similar weight and composition. Read more about our 2015 project here.
Then, in 2021, we repeated this process. We were able to expand our reference data to include 26 additional categories (adding unpowered items, such as clothes) as well as update the data for the existing categories. Read more about our 2021 project here.
You can view the sources for our reference data, review the data quality for each category, and download for your own use.
(In July 2018 as part of the redevelopment of the Fixometer, we discovered and resolved some subtle bugs in the calculations that meant figures for Miscellaneous products were being under-reported. You can find out more about these here.)