The Footprint of Things: A hybrid approach towards the collection, storage and distribution of life cycle inventory data

Capelleveen, Guido van; Pohl, Johanna; Fritsch, Andreas; Schien, Daniel

doi:10.29007/8pnj

Cited by 7 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…The author has previously worked on modeling languages for sustainability ( [1], [18]), contributed to the conception of LCA technologies [3], and the development of a social LCA analysis tool (see https://fairtronics.org). These efforts can be seen as a pre-alpha cycle of the research project and gained insights flow into the design of the POLCA-method.…”

Section: Results To Date 41 Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Modeling Method for Business Process Oriented Organizational Life Cycle Assessment

Fritsch

2020

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability

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Organizations need to analyze and understand the social, environmental and economic impacts of their operations. Sustainable Business Process Management techniques may provide the necessary visibility of organizational operations and impact hot-spots. However, existing approaches lack a rigorous and comprehensive understanding of sustainability. This paper describes a doctoral research project with the goal to develop a modeling method for Sustainable Business Process Management, that is based on life cycle thinking and integrates Organizational Life Cycle Assessment concepts. A research agenda is described, as well as current intermediary results and next steps. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Business process modeling; Enterprise modeling.

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Section: Results To Date 41 Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a Modeling Method for Business Process Oriented Organizational Life Cycle Assessment

Fritsch

2020

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability

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“…They provided a four-layered structure (perception access layer, data layer, service layer and application layer) to address the issues of the existing LCA technologies such as Gabi, SimaPro, eBalance, etc. On the similar lines, Van Capelleveen et al (2018) provided a hybrid approach for real-time collection, storage and distribution of inventory data and named it “The Footprint of Things.” They pointed out that the major problem with LCA application is the inventory data collection which is time consuming, complex and expensive, but using IoT technologies such as RFID, fiber optic sensors, smart meters, etc., the issue of inventory data collection can be resolved (for more details on LCA, refer Piewkhaow et al , 2014; Almeida et al , 2015).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Therefore, to meet the functional requirements and sustainability, there is a need to assess the environmental impacts of a product or system in its life cycle. In this regard, life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to assess the environmental impacts of the products and services (Van Capelleveen et al , 2018). However, the major issue in implementing LCA is the efficient collection of data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Also, because of structural complexity and the lack of transparency in the supply chains, the data collection lacks accuracy. But, with the emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) and IoT technologies, the problem of real-time data collection can be resolved considerably (Tao et al , 2014; Fu, Shu and Liu, 2018; Fu, Bu, Wu and Singh, 2018; Van Capelleveen et al , 2018). Houston and Reay (2011) asserted that information and communication technology (ICT) has the potential to significantly reduce carbon emissions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Carbon management framework for sustainable manufacturing using life cycle assessment, IoT and carbon sequestration

Mishra

Singh

2019

BIJ

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Purpose Emission reduction methodologies alone are not sufficient to mitigate the climatic catastrophes caused due to ongoing carbon emissions. Rather, a bidirectional approach is required to decarbonize the excess carbon in the atmosphere through carbon sequestration along with carbon reduction. Since the manufacturing sector contributes heavily to the ongoing carbon emissions, the purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for carbon emission reduction and carbon sequestration in the context of the manufacturing industry. Design/methodology/approach In this paper, life cycle assessment (LCA) is employed to track the carbon emission at each stage of the product development life cycle. The pre-requisite for this is the accurate evaluation of the carbon emissions. Therefore, IoT technologies have been employed for collecting real-time data with high credibility to perceive environmental impact caused during the entire life cycle of the product. The total carbon emission calculation is based on the bill of material (BOM)-based LCA of the product to realize the multi-structure (from parts and components to product) as well as multi-stage (from cradle to gate) carbon emission evaluation. Carbon sequestration due to plantation is evaluated using root-shoot ratio and total biomass. Findings A five interwoven layered structure is proposed in the paper to facilitate the real-time data collection and carbon emission evaluation using BOM-based LCA of products. Further, a carbon neutral coefficient (CNC) is proposed to indicate the state of a firm’s carbon sink and carbon emissions. CNC=1 indicates that the firm is carbon neutral. CNC >1 implies that the firm’s carbon sequestration is more than carbon emissions. CNC <1 indicates that the firm’s carbon emission is more than the carbon sink. Originality/value The paper provides a novel framework which integrates the real-time data collection and evaluation of carbon emissions with the carbon sequestration.

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“…There is a considerable literature analyzing the enabling effects of the IoT and motivating the transition towards a more efficient use of resources, a better monitoring of the supply chains, and the development of a circular economy [Ingemarsdotter et al, 2019, van Capelleveen et al, 2018, Mishra and Singh, 2019, Mois et al, 2017, Tao et al, 2014. However, far less research has been conducted on the direct impacts generated by the deployment of the IoT.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the embodied carbon footprint of IoT edge devices with a bottom-up life-cycle approach

Pirson,

Bol

2021

Preprint

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In upcoming years, the number of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices is expected to surge up to tens of billions of physical objects. However, while the IoT is often presented as a promising solution to tackle environmental challenges, the direct environmental impacts generated over the life cycle of the physical devices are usually overlooked. It is implicitly assumed that their environmental burden is negligible compared to the positive impacts they can generate. Yet, because IoT calls for a massive deployment of electronic devices in the environment, life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an essential tool to leverage in order to avoid further increasing the stress on our planet. Some general LCA methodologies for IoT already exist but quantitative results are still scarce. In this paper, we present a parametric framework based on hardware profiles to evaluate the cradle-to-gate carbon footprint of IoT edge devices. We exploit our framework in three ways. First, we apply it on four use cases to evaluate their respective production carbon footprint. Then, we show that the heterogeneity inherent to IoT edge devices must be considered as the production carbon footprint between simple and complex devices can vary by a factor of more than 150×. Finally, we estimate the absolute carbon footprint induced by the worldwide production of IoT edge devices through a macroscopic analysis over a 10-year period. Results range from 22 to 562 MtCO2-eq/year in 2027 depending on the deployment scenarios. However, the truncation error acknowledged for LCA bottom-up approaches usually lead to an undershoot of the environmental impacts. We compared the results of our use cases with the few reports available from Google and Apple, which suggest that our estimates could be revised upwards by a factor around 2× to compensate for the truncation error. Worst-case scenarios in 2027 would therefore reach more than 1000 MtCO2-eq/year. This truly stresses the necessity to consider environmental constraints when designing and deploying IoT edge devices.

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The Footprint of Things: A hybrid approach towards the collection, storage and distribution of life cycle inventory data

Cited by 7 publications

References 22 publications

Towards a Modeling Method for Business Process Oriented Organizational Life Cycle Assessment

Towards a Modeling Method for Business Process Oriented Organizational Life Cycle Assessment

Carbon management framework for sustainable manufacturing using life cycle assessment, IoT and carbon sequestration

Assessing the embodied carbon footprint of IoT edge devices with a bottom-up life-cycle approach

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