As part of an industrial ecology class, I formed part of a three-person team that disassembled and performed a life-cycle analysis on a toy drone. By analyzing the energy use and carbon footprint of various stages of a drone’s life-cycle, we were able to re-design and recommend changes in the drone’s life-cycle that would reduce its cost, energy use, and carbon footprint by over 50%.
Explosion diagram of toy-drone material analysis.