Environmental perspectives and limits for the Internet of Things in the Anthropocene : going beyond systematic Life-Cycle Assessment
(2023)
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- Authors
- Supervisors
- Bol, David
- Abstract
- By connecting every physical object to the Internet, everywhere, and at all time, the Internet of Things (IoT) supports ubiquitous computing in numerous sectors and applications. Although it is frequently presented as a way to make our lives more comfortable and to reduce the environmental footprint of our developed societies, the environmental effects of a massive deployment of IoT devices are barely addressed today. This raises important environmental sustainability concerns, as every activity of humanity is called to urgently decrease its environmental footprint. This thesis therefore aims at improving the understanding of the environmental impacts associated to the IoT. The first part of this thesis fosters quantitative analyses of the environmental impacts of the IoT through systematic life-cycle assessment (LCA). More specifically, we address the challenge of the high heterogeneity inherent to IoT devices, we highlight the variability existing in current estimates of the environmental footprint of integrated circuits production, and we illustrate the trade-offs between streamlined and full LCA approaches on a real-life IoT solution. The second part of this thesis investigates how the consideration of absolute environmental limits such as planetary boundaries or Paris Agreement can impede the ongoing massive IoT deployment. In particular, we show that there is a need to go beyond systematic LCA and we show the potential of integrating LCA in a backcasting approach to rethink the deployment strategy of IoT solutions and steer towards futures in line with environmental limits.
- Affiliations
Citations
Pirson, T. (2023). Environmental perspectives and limits for the Internet of Things in the Anthropocene : going beyond systematic Life-Cycle Assessment. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/100667