fernanda villalobos - Full Circle Electronics

Company / December 2023 - October 2024

Full Circle Electronics is a safe, secure, and sustainable electronics recycling provider specializing in scalable asset and decommissioning recycling processes for small to large industries. I was hired at the company as an accounting technician but expressed interest in website design after seeing their company website and hearing that they wanted to make changes to the look and content.

I used Bricks, the visual site builder for Wordpress websites, to redesign pages and incorporate new features that the team expressed the website was missing. Below I will discuss the custom sustainability calculator I created for the company, as well as the visual changes I made to the website and new pages I created.

Custom Sustainability Calculator

Project Sope

The company was interested in having a custom sustainability calculator on their website where customers that recycled or were thinking about recycling their electronics could see the impact of their recycling efforts on the environment.

My task was to create a calculator that was intuitively designed for anyone to use, and would display the calculations in a visually interesting way. When the customer inputs the quantities of recycled items, the calculator estimates the amount (pounds) of electronics recycled and the weight is converted to CO2 emissions. To put the CO2 in perspective, I also wanted to include every day examples that were equivalent to the CO2 emissions that you reduced through recycling.

Research

The EPA (United States Environmental Protection Agency) website has a greenhouse gas equivalencies calculator as well as an entire page explaining all of the calculations they used to convert greenhouse gas emissions to the different equivalent units in their calculator.

Their calculator has the option to enter CO2 emissions and convert that data into equivalencies, which was the goal for Full Circle Electronic's custom calculator. The page with the calculations and references that they used was very helpful in the process.

Calculations used from EPA - Calculations and References

Miles driven by an average gasoline powered vehicle: 8.89 × 10-3 metric tons CO2/gallon gasoline × 1/22.9 miles per gallon car/truck average × 1 CO2, CH4, and N2O/0.993 CO2 = 3.91 x 10-4 metric tons CO2E/mile

Gallons of gasoline consumed: 8,887 grams of CO2/gallon of gasoline = 8.887 × 10-3 metric tons CO2/gallon of gasoline

Smartphones charged: [22.596 Wh – (22 hours x 0.0415 Watts)] x 1 kWh/1,000 Wh = 0.022 kWh/smartphone charged

0.022 kWh/charge x 1,540.1 pounds CO2/MWh delivered electricity x 1 MWh/1,000 kWh x 1 metric ton/2,204.6 lbs = 1.51 x 10-5 metric tons CO2/smartphone charged

Barrels of oil consumed: 5.80 mmbtu/barrel × 20.31 kg C/mmbtu × 44 kg CO2/12 kg C × 1 metric ton/1,000 kg = 0.43 metric tons CO2/barrel

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources website has an Electronics Collection Site Weight Tracking Template that has the average weight of various types of electronics. This was another resource I used for the custom calculator. It helped me determine the average weight of: CRT TV/Monitors, Flat TVs/Monitors, Desktop Computers, Cell Phones, Printers, Laptops/Tablets, Small Appliances and Large Appliances.

Web Calculator Builder

There were different methods I could have used to create the calculator, I thought about coding the calculator from scratch but decided it would be faster to use a builder that could be embedded in the company website. I used Calconic as the web calculator builder because there were many features that could be implemented and options for customization.

I didn't use a specific template from Calconic, I instead created my own from what I knew the team wanted and I looked at many different web calculators for inspiration.

Final product demonstration

Website Design Changes

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