Environmental impacts of digitalization in buildings

The urgency of climate change and the aspirations to protect the environment has directed the attention towards the building sector to reduce its environmental impacts.

The advancements in information and communication technologies (ICT) have provided many opportunities for digitalization in the building sector to improve the operations and processes.

Some applications of digitalization in buildings include space use efficiency, building automation, energy management, demand response, behavior change campaigns, and predictive maintenance.

As ICT becomes more cost-effective and adaptable, new applications of digitalization in buildings continuously emerge.Digitalization in building sector is often promoted for reducing the environmental impacts and to have a positive effect on the environmental sustainability.

However, such claims are often undertaken without a holistic approach on both positive and negative effects of ICT solutions.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology assesses the environmental impacts of all stages of products and services which can be applied on ICT-based digital solutions to understand their negative impacts along with their benefits.

Digitalization in buildings is enabled by ICT which comprises of various components such as sensing devices, connectivity and data transmission parts, network systems, data storage systems, and actuating devices.

These components have environmental footprints which could be related to different life cycle phases such as manufacturing of devices and components, their operation and also their disposal.

LCA methodology reveals the environmental footprints along with the benefits to have a better understanding of their overall effects.There are many studies in the scientific literature about the effects of various system designs and configurations on the technical performance of ICT solutions.

However, the design and configurations can also be important for their environmental performance, which is mostly neglected. These configurations could be related to certain components of the digital solutions.

For example, the sensing devices could be set to sample data based on certain events or on certain intervals, which affects their hardware, their energy use and data volume.

Another example is the connectivity as the use of wired or wireless sensors causes changes in sensors’ hardware and data transmission components.

Moreover, various practices related to data handling lead to the use of different hardwares and components with different footprints related to their production, operation and disposal phases.

These practices are related to the use of local or cloud servers for data storage, duration of storing data, data selection for long-term storage, etc.This project aims to evaluate various digital solutions in buildings to identify and analyse the factors of system configuration and design that can affect their environmental performance.

This project is implemented in collaboration with several partners from academia and industry which provides a unique setup to access the commercial ICT solutions and their components and real-life cases with operating ICT solutions.

The existing physical infrastructures in case study buildings allow investigating a diverse range of ICT solutions with different applications and different designs and configurations.

The important factors of system design and configurations that can affect the environmental impact of the ICT solutions are identified based on the literature review, interviews with professionals, and observations of the operating systems. The identified factors are investigated in case studies by applying LCA methodology.

The effects of changing the design and configurations on the environmental impacts of the ICT solutions are investigated along with their technical performance which allows tailoring the solutions for specific functions. The analyses consider various impact categories to understand their tradeoffs regarding variou