Mika Portugaise
Oxford University, PhD
EREF Scholar 2024
Contribution of Upstream Waste Mitigation Interventions in the Electronic Industry to Electronic Waste Management and Circular Economy Goals
The challenges of electronic waste management are as complex as they are compelling. Widely acknowledged to be the fastest-growing municipal waste stream globally (Forti et al., 2020), Critical Raw Material (CRM) composition of constituent electronics’ parts in tandem with the presence of toxic components has positioned e-waste as a field highly relevant to the guiding principles of Circular Economy – due to potential for secondary resource streams through recycling, simultaneously mitigating environmental and human health hazards and re-circulating critical and dwindling primary resources. My research aims to advance electronic waste management efforts by situating electronics lifecycle production chains within the Circular Economy paradigm. This will be done both by exploring the ecosystems that have evolved around EoL e-waste management in various cases and how mitigation of waste at the pre-consumer life stages of electronic and electrical equipment can impact circularity of supply and manufacturing. To this end, how to effectively recover secondary resources from the urban mine, and how to re-incorporate these resources to offset primary resource use is of particular importance. Current e-waste management policy focuses largely on EoL and Extended Producer Responsibility targets, however; a Circular Economy approach aims to better understand incorporation across lifecycle stages – particularly how resource recovery efficiency and improvements in reintegrating these recovered resources can mitigate production-level waste and create more sustainable electronics’ production cycles.
Biography
Mika Kaibara Portugaise is currently pursuing her doctorate degree at the University of Oxford in the Department of Engineering Science. She received a B.Des in Architecture at OCAD University in Toronto (Canada), before moving to Japan to complete a M.Eng in Architecture at the University of Tokyo. During this degree, she was exposed to the persistent and developing issues related to electronic waste management, and deciding to pursue this research through a M.Sc in Environment and Natural Resources with a specialization in Environmental Management, Science, and Policy at the University of Iceland, during which she also spent three months as a research student hosted by the University of Tokyo for her dissertation research.
