The new evolution of the production and industrial process called Industry 4.0, and its related technologies such as the Internet of Things, big data analytics, and cyber–physical systems, among others, still have an unknown potential impact on sustainability and the environment. In this paper, we conduct a literature-based analysis to discuss the sustainability impact and challenges of Industry 4.0 from four different scenarios: deployment, operation and technologies, integration and compliance with the sustainable development goals, and long-run scenarios. From these scenarios, our analysis resulted in positive or negative impacts related to the basic production inputs and outputs flows: raw material, energy and information consumption and product and waste disposal. As the main results, we identified both positive and negative expected impacts, with some predominance of positives that can be considered positive secondary effects derived from Industry 4.0 activities. However, only through integrating Industry 4.0 with the sustainable development goals in an eco-innovation platform, can it really ensure environmental performance. It is expected that this work can contribute to helping stakeholders, practitioners and governments to advance solutions to deal with the outcomes emerging through the massive adoption of those technologies, as well as supporting the expected positive impacts through policies and financial initiatives.

Due to the rising demand for food, increasing intensive livestock production contributes significantly to the anthropogenic loading of the biosphere. Poultry and fish from intensive operations are a primary source for global human food consumption, and the contribution to air and water emissions. The environment can act as a sink of emissions by using it the capacity for diluting pollutants. In this way, the "support area" derived from the renewable resources supplied by region was quantified for both enterprises regarding emergy. Results suggest that poultry production seems to be a thousand times more "eco-efficient" than aquaculture as well as presenting a lower support area. Accounting for the environmental services required to dilute emissions is shown to be a necessary procedure towards the proper evaluation of long-term sustainability and quantification of externalities.

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