Environmental impact of digitalisation in buildings

Digitalization of buildings with information and communication technologies (ICT) provide many opportunities to achieve resource and energy efficiency. Building digitalization enables smart building concepts with the functions based on either monitoring or advanced control. Digitalization is depended on ICT components such as sensing devices, connectivity and data transmission parts, network systems, data storage systems, and actuating devices. These components have environmental footprints during different life cycle phases such as manufacturing, operation and disposal. There are many studies on the effects of various system designs and configurations on the technical performance of ICT solutions, however, such investigations for the environmental impacts are mostly missing. The configurations could be related to certain components or overall system design such as the sensing, data sampling, connectivity and data handling which lead to the use of different hardware with different footprints during their life cycle phases, which can be investigated with Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology.

This project is implemented in collaboration with several partners with diverse expertise which allows a research design based on the existing physical infrastructures in case study buildings. The important factors of system design and configurations that can affect the environmental impact of the ICT solutions are investigated in case studies by applying LCA methodology. The analyses consider several impact categories to understand their tradeoffs regarding various system configurations. The project provides guidelines to product and system developers on the important aspects they should take into account when designing and developing ICT solutions. Moreover, the findings are useful for property and facility managers and building developers to take optimal decisions when adopting ICT solutions to fulfill the environmental considerations with acceptable system performance.