SEOUL, Korea (Feb. 25, 2024) – LG Display, the world’s leading innovator of display technologies, announced today that its OLED TV and Transparent OLED displays have received one eco-friendly certification after another from global verification institutions, as the company further reduced the use of plastics while ramping up the use of recycled materials.
Through these latest certifications, OLED’s all-round technological leadership has been recognized for superb eco-friendliness on top of innovative picture quality, as proven by the company’s latest OLED TV panels with new ‘META Technology 2.0’ along with the world’s only Transparent OLEDs.
UL Solutions, a global independent safety science company, has granted its ‘Low Plastic Content’ verification to all of LG Display’s OLED TV and Gaming OLED panels. Representing a first for display panels, this verification is only granted to products with plastic contents of less than 5% of a product’s total weight.
When measured internally, LG Display’s 65-inch OLED TV panel’s plastic content rate was found to be approximately 4% of the total weight, representing more than 90% less plastic usage than LCD TV panels of the same size.
Unlike LCD panels, the company’s OLEDs do not require a backlight unit to emit light behind the screen, as each pixel in an OLED display emits light on its own. Moreover, OLED panels minimize the use of film sheets, allowing a significant plastic reduction. LG Display has additionally cut plastic usage by replacing
major OLED panel parts with recyclable materials, while increasing its recycling rate of parts to 92.7% when disposing of products.
Moreover, the company’s third-generation OLED TV panels with advanced ‘META Technology 2.0’ maximize light emission from organic light-emitting components, resulting in approximately 22% higher energy efficiency than conventional OLEDs of the same brightness, thus reducing power consumption.
Meanwhile, LG Display’s Transparent OLED, mass-produced only by LG Display in the world, obtained the Eco-Product Certification Mark from SGS, a Swiss-based global leader in inspection, verification, testing, and certification.
This certification is only granted to products that comply with global environmental regulations and meet SGS’s eco-friendly evaluation criteria spanning across the entire product life cycle, from production to consumer use to disposal. This marks the first eco-friendly certification for Transparent OLED and is an achievement that will help shape the industry’s environmental standards for next-generation displays.
LG Display’s Transparent OLED panel received high scores in the resource efficiency, energy efficiency, and minimal use of harmful substances categories, with all its components comprising up to 23% recycled materials, while also adhering to the EU’s REACH regulations on chemical substance management by refraining from using any of over 200 types of high-risk substances.
Since 2021, LG Display’s efforts to develop eco-friendly products has seen it implement a life cycle evaluation (LCA) technique that comprehensively assesses all environmental impacts that may occur in the product life cycle. Through this approach, the company has achieved reduction in material and component usage, minimized greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption during manufacturing, and waste reduction in disposal stages, on top of the development of highly energy-efficient products.
Furthermore, the company has established a roadmap for developing mid- to long-term energy-saving products to enable consumers to further reduce power consumption, while also continuously developing low-carbon OLED technology processes and component reduction techniques.
“We are committed to proactively advancing environmental-friendly OLED development in response to ESG trends, while simultaneously actively promoting the technological excellence of LG Display’s OLED panels, which not only offer outstanding picture quality but also demonstrate a focus on environmental,” said Min-kyu Jin, Head of the Large Display Promotion Division at LG Display.