Analysis of the Relationship Between Carbon Footprint and Mineral Resource Depletion in the Life Cycle Assessment of Digital Systems

Abstract

While ecodesign relies on multi-impact life cycle assessment (LCA), carbon-driven evaluation of digital systems often overlooks the mineral-intensive nature of electronics manufacturing and the structural relevance of abiotic depletion potential for elements (ADP-e). This paper assesses the structural importance of ADP-e alongside global warming potential (GWP) under the EF 3.1 methodology and quantifies their statistical alignment across digital system component categories. Based on life-cycle inventory data from ecoinvent 3.11 and CODDE databases, we perform a comparative LCA on 205 electronic components and systems. The relationship between GWP and ADP-e is analyzed using Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients. Our results show a statistically significant but weak global correlation between GWP and ADP-e, indicating that carbon footprint provides limited predictive insight into mineral resource depletion. This weak alignment is especially evident at the component level, where batteries, semiconductors, passives, and displays exhibit little or no significant correlation, whereas stronger dependencies appear only at the system level. These findings support the systematic inclusion of ADP-e alongside GWP as a co-primary indicator in digital systems ecodesign, preventing carbon-driven optimization from masking material resource trade-offs.