The material side of virtualization

The Environmental Informatics community could recently celebrate its 20th anniversary. The application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to problems of environmental research and management has made considerable progress and contributes to sustainable development. Moreover, ICT has the potential to virtualize processes that would otherwise consume considerable amounts of material and energy; virtual meetings, for instance, could avoid 97-98% of the CO2 emissions of physical meetings.The time, space, material and energy needed to provide a unit of ICT service have roughly decreased by a factor of 1000 since the first PC was sold. It seems therefore natural that researchers and industries using ICT in the environmental field ignore the environmental impacts caused by ICT hardware – they are just negligible compared to the environmental benefits that can be realized with the applications.Paradoxically, it is the progress in ICT hardware efficiency that has made ICT a part of the problem, too. The global mass and energy flows caused throughout the hardware life cycle are increasing due to the wide-spread use of ICT products and their decreasing useful lives. The environ-mental problems caused by the production, use and disposal of ICT hard-ware are solvable in principle; they are not as hard as the discrepancy between - e.g. - growing mobility and CO2 reduction goals. But problems can only be solved if they are not neglected

Környezeti informatika és a fenntartható információs társadalom víziója

A tanulmány a kibontakozó információs társadalom és a fenntarthatóság mint cél közötti kapcsolatokat tárgyalja. Hogyan járulhat hozzá az információs technológia a fenntartható fejlődéshez? Melyek az információs társadalom lehetőségei és kockázatai a fenntarthatóság mint elérendő cél szempontjából? A szerző az információs és kommunikációs technológiák (IKT) és a fenntarthatóság közötti kölcsönhatások két fő területét, nevezetesen a környezeti információk feldolgozásával foglalkozó környezeti informatikát (Environmental Informatics) és az információs társadalom működésében releváns szerepet játszó technológiák (röviden: információs társadalmi technológiák) hatásait vizsgálja

Pervasive Computing -A Case for the Precautionary Principle?

Abstract The Precautionary Principle aims to anticipate and minimize potentially serious or irreversible risks under conditions of uncertainty. It has been incorporated into many international treaties and pieces of national legislation for environmental protection and sustainable development. However the precautionary principle has not yet been applied systematically to novel Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The results of EMPA's four-year research program "Sustainability in the Information Society" (www.empa.ch/sis), co-funded by the ETH board, suggest that precaution is necessary in the ICT field and show how the general principle of precaution can be put in concrete terms in the context of the information society. In particular, we advocate precautionary measures directed towards pervasive applications of ICTs (Pervasive Computing) because of their large potential impacts on society Assessing a technological vision before it has materialized makes it necessary to deal with two types of uncertainty: first, the uncertainty of how fast and to which extent the technology will be taken up and how it will be used; second, the uncertainty of causal models connecting technologyrelated causes with potential social, health or environmental effects. Due to these uncertainties, quantitative methods to evaluate expected risks are inadequate. Instead, we developed a "risk filter" that makes it possible to rank risks according to a set of qualitative criteria based on the Precautionary Principle and on the principle of Sustainable Development ). The following potential negativ impacts of Pervasive Computing on society were identified: restriction of consumers' and patients' freedom of choice, stress caused by time-rebound effects and by unreliable technology, a 'dissipation' of responsibility in computer-controlled environments, and threats to ecological sustainability caused by a new type of electronic waste It is indisputable that ICT plays an necessary role in tackling the most difficult challenge facing global society today -Sustainable Development Since RFID technology is one of the forerunners of Pervasive Computing, and as such is expected to play an important role in daily life in the near futur

Toward a method for assessing the energy impacts of telecommuting based on time-use data

Most telecommuting (TC) studies focus on travel impacts and do not consider changes in time spent on non-travel activities (e.g. ‘leisure’) and the energy impacts of these changes. We demonstrate a time-use approach to assess interrelations between changes in commuting time and time spent on travel and non-travel activities and associated energy impacts. Time-use data analysis shows that spending less time on commuting is associated with more time spent on ‘sleep’, ‘leisure’, ‘personal, household and family care’, ‘private travel’ and ‘eating and drinking’. Substituting car commuting with ‘sleep’, ‘eating and drinking’, common ‘leisure’ and ‘personal, household and family care’ activities is likely to reduce energy requirements as these are associated with less energy requirements than car commuting. This is different for ‘private travel’, ‘meal preparation at home’, and energy-intensive or out-of-home ‘leisure’ activities, which are associated with relatively high energy requirements. The commute modal split is a key variable in energy impacts of TC, because transport modes differ in their energy requirements. While car commuters can realize high energy savings through TC, for people who usually bike or walk to work, direct energy savings through reduced commuting are zero. Thus, any additional energy impact due to substitute activities, increases net direct energy requirements. Future research should further investigate the relationship between TC and time spent on (non-)travel activities and the marginal energy requirements of these activities. If so, the time-use approach can become key for assessing energy impacts of TC and other applications which impact individual time allocation

An agent-based model of wood markets: Scenario analysis

We present an agent-based model of wood markets. The model covers softwood and hardwood markets for sawlogs, energy wood, and industrial wood. Our study region is a mountainous area in Switzerland that is close to the border, and therefore partially depends on the wood markets of the adjacent countries. The wood markets in this study region are characterized by many small-scale wood suppliers, and a mix of private and publicowned forests. The model was developed to investigate the availability of wood in the study region under different market conditions. We defined several scenarios that are relevant to policy makers and analyzed them with a focus on the two most important assortments of wood in the study region, namely, sawlogs softwood and energy wood softwood. The development of the prices and amounts sold in the scenarios are compared to a business-as-usual scenario. The scenarios were designed to investigate i) the influence of intermediaries, ii) the influence of the profit-orientation of forest owners, iii) the influence of the exchange rate, and iv) the consequences of set-asides in the study region. The presented model has a large potential to support the planning of policy measures as it allows capturing emergent phenomena, and thereby facilitates identifying potential consequences of policy measures planned prior to their implementation. This was demonstrated by discussing the scenario findings with respect to Switzerland's forestry policy objective of increasing the harvested amount of wood to the sustainable potential. We showed that a higher profit-orientation of forest owners would be beneficial for this objective, but also revealed potential conflicts of different economic goals

Environmental assessment of end-of-life treatment options for a GSM 900 antenna rack

Goal, Scope and Background. Telephony as well as remote data transfer is increasingly performed via mobile phone networks. However, the environmental consequences, in particular of the End-of-Life (EOL) treatment, of such network infrastructures have been investigated insufficiently to date. In the present report the environmental implications of the EOL treatment of a single GSM 900 antenna rack have been analysed

An information system supporting cap and trade in organizations

We present a software system to create and implement internal markets in organizations that want to limit the CO2 emissions or the use of scarce resources by their employees. This system can be applied to domains such as business travel by distributing a limited number of permits for business travel-related CO2 emissions at the beginning of a period and then allowing the permits to be traded inside the organization. The system calculates the CO2 emissions caused by planned trips and provides the market mechanisms to trade the permits. The approach can be generalized from emission permits to any scarce good that is assigned by the management to units or individual members of the organization, such as parking spaces. Both cases are described by way of detailed examples

Consumer-oriented interventions to extend smartphones’ service lifetime

A promising strategy to reduce smartphones' environmental footprint is to increase their service lifetime, thereby reducing the demand for resource-intensive production of new devices. Most of the existing literature focuses on production-oriented measures, such as improving repairability, but what remains missing is a systematic overview of consumer-oriented interventions to extend smartphones' service lifetime. In this study, we applied the consumer intervention mapping approach by systematically identifying consumer decision situations along the smartphone life cycle and interventions that encourage consumers to make smartphone lifetime-extending decisions. We identify two main mechanisms to achieve lifetime extension: retention by increasing the time during which a user keeps a device, and recirculation by passing on a device to an additional user. Altogether, we identified 26 different types of interventions to induce consumers to make smartphone lifetime-extending decisions and structure these according to consumer-influence techniques, e.g., informing consumers about retention/recirculation options and environmental impacts caused throughout device life cycles, persuading consumers by creating emotional attachment, nudging consumers through product labels for secondhand devices, simplifying execution of lifetime-extending decision options through take-back programs, and incentivizing lifetime-extension through buy-back programs. These interventions' success in achieving lifetime extensions and reducing environmental impacts in practice depends on the degree to which they actually extend smartphones' service lifetime and reduce production of new devices (displacement rate), induction and re-spending effects associated with the interventions, and the interventions’ implementation feasibility, which conflicts of interest in the smartphone ecosystem often challenge