Development of an Innovative ICT Infrastructure for an Eco-Cost System with Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

A novel Internet-based information communication technology (ICT) infrastructure for an eco-accounting system was successfully developed to deliver “EcoCosts”, which are the values of environmental impact throughout the product life cycle. The ICT infrastructure manages its internal elements and interacts with operation modules in the supply chain via Web-based service interfaces. The infrastructure consists of upperware, middleware, and resource layers. The upperware layer manipulates the middleware elements (cloud-based load balancing, life cycle assessment, Web-based services, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)-enabled mobile access), and manages the associated resources within the eco-accounting system. As novel features of the ICT infrastructure, load balancing is used to handle large numbers of data and to allocate the computing load across the eco-accounting network nodes, and life cycle assessment is conducted to analyse product footprints, which are the core of “EcoCost”, to facilitate consumers in comparing the environmental impacts between different products. A case study was conducted by transmitting product EcoCosts from businesses to consumers through the Internet, successfully verifying the system developed in this research. Because this research aims to pay more attention to the ICT aspects, the EcoCost is represented using a single value, hence simplifying the related calculation. This research provides a novel solution for dealing with the large numbers of data and computing loads required to manage EcoCost data throughout the product life cycle and to transmit EcoCosts from businesses to consumers.

Sustainable Product Innovation and Consumer Communication

“…The eco-cost method has been further applied in the CIRC4Life project supported by the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme [91], and the eco-cost was illustrated in eco-accounting and ecoshopping [92,93]. An ICT infrastructure for implementing the eco-cost was reported in [94].…”