Measuring the environmental impact of ICT hardware

Abstract

Society needs information and communication technology (ICT) hardware to produce, process and store highly valuable information. This hardware, of course, affects the environment throughout its whole life cycle, starting with manufacturing, where the necessary scarce and precious resources (e.g. rare earth metals) are often mined under miserable environmental conditions. This leads to pollution of soil, water and air in the present as well as for the future. During the use phase of ICT hardware, energy consumption impacts the environment. At the end of life of ICT hardware, recycling, disposing as e-waste in landfills or disassembling are additional impacts that affect the environment. More and more producers and users, especially companies, want to measure these impacts, which is a complex task. However, approaches to measure the impacts are at hand, either as single indicators, measuring one specific impact, or as composed indicators, combining different single indicators into one 'summarizing' indicator. However, collection of data, measurement, assessment and interpretation are challenging. Unfortunately, guidelines for those who want to measure the impact of ICT hardware are rare. With our research, we aim to shed light on the various approaches to measure impacts of ICT hardware as well as their application in practice. Based on a literature review, we identified different indicators and them to the attention of experts from companies to assess these approaches in terms of practicability, significance and value for practice. The results show that research investigates and proposes a variety of different more or less complex indicators. However, business prefers single indicators, which are easy to measure and understand.

Digital Technology and Services for Sustainable Agriculture in Tanzania: A Literature Review

“…Furthermore, ICT hardware has an immense effect on the environment throughout its life cycle. The manufacturing phase involves using rare earth metals extracted under unfavorable environmental practices, which causes water, soil and air pollution, with high energy consumption in the use phase and e-waste produced in the final phase [89]. The cloud computing model commonly used in precision agriculture has also an immense negative impact on the environment due to carbon emission from data centers that host massive data [68].…”

“…The cloud computing model commonly used in precision agriculture has also an immense negative impact on the environment due to carbon emission from data centers that host massive data [68]. To achieve the component of environmental sustainability, engineers propose using energy-efficient hardware, using renewable energy such as solar and wind, recycling e-waste and designing new tools such as cooling systems and datacenters with minimal impact to the environment [86,[89][90][91]. We acknowledge the environmental impact of solar panels in their production and disposal phases; however, our focus is on the usage phase.…”

Haste

“…Here, in geographically liminal areas, people work in miserable environmental conditions with limited or no control over safety standards. At the end of life, hardware recycling, disposal in landfills and disassembling areas all impact on the environment with limited acknowledgement of it (Krumay & Brandtweiner, 2016). Awareness of the harmful consequences of hightechnology production processes on workers and the environment is still nascent, while digital consumerism adds mountains of toxic electronic junk around the world (Smith, Sonnenfeld & Pellow, 2006;Pickren, 2014;Schmidt, 2010;Kamiya, 2020).…”

The cyber-consciousness of environmental assessment: how environmental assessments evaluate the impacts of smart, connected, and digital technology

“…These claims and counterclaims about the potential impacts of ICT have received attention in the literature ever since digitalization trends emerged in industrial economies (Eason 1997, Jokinen et al 1998, Hilty 2008. Prior literature reviews have described indicators (Krumay and Brandtweiner 2016), methods (Kopelias et al 2020) and devised frameworks (Lago et al 2015) directed toward improving environmental assessment of ICT. Articles that have systematically reviewed methods related to environmental assessment of ICT include:…”