Why Fairtronics?

The social impacts of electronics production are very difficult to measure. Conducting a social life cycle assessment of an electronics product is a complex and expensive effort and even than cannot cover every last detail of the supply chain.

While workers’ rights violations are endemic to the whole electronics supply chain, problems are especially severe in resource extraction. At the same time, this is the stage where analysis is most difficult to gather accurate data due to the inherent intransparency of global resource trade.

At the same time, manufacturers can take active steps to reduce social impacts in their supply chains. For example, they can use fairly traded raw materials, which has been pioneered by companies such as Fairphone and Syllucid.

Our goal is to create a tool with a sufficient level of detail to make visible the improvements achieved through such interventions.

What is Fairtronics?

Fairtronics is an open-source software and research project led by FairLötet.

While FairLötet is responsible for maintaining the project vision and provides a small amount of funding for the project, a large part of the work on Fairtronics is done by volunteers.

So far we have released two software products:

• A visualization demo, which showcases our latest analysis model and allows you to explore an open-hardware product, navigating through its parts, materials, raw resources, countries of origin, and calculated social impacts.
• The Prototype, which shows how a Fairtronics analysis might be integrated into a tool geared towards electronics manufacturers.

Our source code can be found on Gitlab.