Authors

Zapico, Jorge L.
Brandt, Nils
Turpeinen, Marko

Title

Environmental Metrics: The Main Opportunity from ICT for Industrial Ecology

Published in

Journal of Industrial Ecology 14, 703-706, (2010),  doi: 10.1111/j.1530-9290.2010.00272.x

Summary

There is a growing interest in the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) for environmental sustainability, including from academia, industry, and governance. There are still concerns about ICTs’ direct environmental impact, such as energy use and e-waste. The positive effects of using ICT for sustainability, however, are argued to be bigger (Climate Group 2008; Tomlinson 2010), and the corpus of research in this area is growing fast (DiSalvo et al. 2010). We have identified some of the most prominent trends in this research and organized them into three clusters where ICT has a positive impact on environmental problems: optimization, dematerialization, and behavioral change. Metrics, the measurement and accounting of data, are presented as the common ground for all three and therefore a main opportunity that arises from ICT for industrial ecology.

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