This study focuses on embodied carbon emissions of user devices associated with accessing networks: Tablets, smartphones and feature phones, laptop and desktop PCs and customer premises equipment (CPEs).

The paper investigates the embodied carbon emissions by applying different approaches:

• the commonly used approach where estimated product carbon emissions are scaled up by shipments
• allocation of the electronic sector companies’ reported data combined with materials data for the products, and the upstream carbon emissions reported by user device vendors (final manufacturers).

Despite its sensitivity to allocation the second approach is considered to give the most reasonable overall result of about 180 million tonnes carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) related to chosen user device types and shipments in 2020.