A few random notes:
- Your model neglects the charging case with its own battery and microcontroller.
- A Trsla is more likely to be recycled properly than the same amount of earbuds. Itbis also more recycleable because ofnthe high amount of steel and other bulk materials in it.
- The ratio of semiconductor electronics to total weight is extremely different between the two products. And semiconductor manufacturing is extremely resource intensive. All we typically see is squeaky clean neon lit clean rooms, which belie the use of high amounts of aggressive and toxic chemicals that have to be produced somewhere and generate waste that is never talked about.
Many of these are all excellent points. I did exclude the case.
The car recycling v.s. electronics recycling question is interesting. I once had a very interesting conversation with an electronics recycler on a plane trip - phones could not be recycled like other electronics because of some of the metals content - in particular beryllium copper content (used in spring contacts). He described it as a lot of electronics is ground up and a chemical processes used to extract the valuable elements. With phones the grinding up was the toxic / dangerous prohibited part.
I think the semiconductor numbers are more subtle though. It is sq. mm in the product and yield that are factors. A single power switching element in a Tesla will likely exceed the total silicon sq. mm usage in an AirPod. There is a lot of electronics in a Tesla. Some of the Tesla circuitry is more exotic, Silicon Carbide or GaN. I need to look into how much recovery / reprocessing silicon mfg is using for the reagents. The waste produced isn't as bad as it was in the Silicon Valley heyday where every original mfg site is now a superfund site with very large plumes of toxic waste in the subsoil.