Should I buy apples that were produced regionally, or ones imported from Poland, which are somehow a little bit cheaper? I guess everyone has had thoughts like this while shopping for groceries or other items. But have you ever had these thoughts while buying, downloading, or using digital products? I guess not, and that’s not a shame, because I haven’t had these thoughts either. Therefore, I want to talk about the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of digital products in this blog post.
What is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product from creation to disposal or recycling. The goal is to explore the product’s environmental footprint. It involves examining the following five phases of a product:
- Raw Material Extraction
- Manufacturing & Processing
- Transportation
- Usage & Retail
- Waste Disposal
There are four main models, based on those five phases of a product:
1. Cradle-to-grave: Considers the product’s impact across all five life cycle steps, from raw material extraction (cradle) to product disposal (grave).
2. Cradle-to-gate: Focuses on assessing the product until it leaves the factory gates, excluding the use and disposal phases.
3. Cradle-to-cradle: Linked to the Circular Economy, this concept replaces the waste stage with a recycling process, making the product reusable for another purpose.
4. Gate-to-gate: Used in product life cycles with multiple value-adding processes. Simplifies assessment by focusing on one value-added process in the production chain.
Now you know what a LCA is, so let’s move on to digital LCAs and apply this to digital products.1
Digital LCAs
“Compared to the physical world, sustainable web design will de-emphasize the manufacturing (production) stage, making it qualitatively different from print design. Why? Unlike physical products, web pages don’t produce waste paper or ink after the page disappears, only heat from the electronics. For this reason, the cost of web page manufacture will be small compared to the cost of ongoing use. On the other hand, the longer a web page is viewed, the more bits it burns, so efficient use based on good user experience will be very important.“ – Dr. Pete Markiewicz
How can we apply the LCA to digital products? Dr. Pete Markiewicz proposed the following framework for equating DLCAs to their physical counterparts:
| LCA | DLCA |
|---|---|
| Materials | Software and visual assets |
| Manufacturing | Design and development |
| Packaging | Uploaded to the Internet |
| Distribution | Downloaded through the network |
| Usage | Interaction, UX, completing tasks |
| Disposal | Data erased form client |
Software and visual assets
In exploring the environmental impact of digital products and services, the focus shifts from the energy consumption of manufacturing processes to the software and visual assets involved. Questions arise about the sustainability of cloud-based services, specifically whether they are hosted on platforms powered by renewable energy. Additionally, the energy efficiency of software creation becomes a crucial consideration, with concerns ranging from the application’s design principles to the company’s use of renewable energy in its offices. It’s also important to consider the resource usage of software, including factors like unnecessary features and the energy efficiency of equipment.
Design and development
In the realm of digital product design and development, efficiency gains and energy savings can be achieved, particularly during the initial phases. Employing strategies like progressive enhancement and adopting a mobile-first approach ensures broader accessibility to digital products and services. Utilizing web standards such as HTML5 and CSS3, along with emerging open-source frameworks like webVR and OSVR, facilitates efficient content delivery across various devices. Compliance with accessibility standards ensures that content can be accessed by users with disabilities, expanding the reach across different platforms. When conducting an inventory analysis for digital product design and development, crucial questions include assessing the use of outdated or nonstandard technology, optimizing for mobile devices, and ensuring the compression or minification of images, scripts, and other assets for optimal delivery speed.
Server uploads, network downloads
The absence of physical packaging and transportation for digital products doesn’t eliminate energy consumption. Even though these products don’t rely on cargo ships, energy is still essential to deliver them to their virtual destinations. To address this, designers and developers can enhance the efficiency of applications and ensure they are hosted on servers powered by renewable energy sources, milder energy loss during transmission. Leveraging Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) further aids in minimizing energy loss by serving pages and content from servers closest to the user.
Interaction
All digital products and services require energy to run. Interaction represents the most profound way they differ from their physical counterparts. Question is how much energy do they use? How can one answer this for a DLCA? Here are some questions to ask:
- How much traffic does the site or app get?
- How much of the traffic comprises computers versus mobile devices?
- How much energy do each of those devices use per second or per minute?
- How much data is uploaded/downloaded per device per minute?
- What is the average amount of time spent using the digital product or service?
You can find answers to many of these questions via Google Analytics or other metrics measurement applications.
Disposal of Data
Unlike physical products, digital products don’t involve recycling, but the turnover in digital products can result in residual data, increasing application size and environmental footprint. The front-end power used for removal is minimal compared to overall usage, but practices like data backup (e.g., in systems like Git) may raise concerns about electricity use and efficiency. As applications grow in size and complexity, addressing questions about processor resources for removal, residual information on users‘ devices, and the number of unused accounts in the database becomes crucial to understand and minimize environmental impact.2
- Quist, Zazala (n. d.): Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) – Complete Beginner’s Guide.
URL: https://ecochain.com/blog/life-cycle-assessment-lca-guide/#who-needs-LCA ↩︎ - Frick, Tim (2016): Designing for Sustainability. A Guide to building greener digital products & services. ↩︎