Sustainability, business and plant¶
Last night you watched a match on your phone. No paper, no petrol, no plastic: digital is clean, right? Somewhere a data centre sent you that video, its servers ran all night, and they were cooled by machines that use electricity and sometimes water. Your phone was made from metals dug out of a mine, and one day it will become electronic waste.
So, are enabling technologies good or bad for the planet? The honest answer is "it depends, and you have to measure it". On islands with limited water and land, and a population that swells every summer, measuring and adjusting consumption matters a lot. This page gives you both faces of the coin, then answers a second question your report needs: where does each technology act, in the offices or on the plant floor, and what does it improve there?
What you will learn
- Explain how enabling technologies help an efficient and sustainable economy (face A) and what environmental cost they have (face B)
- Recognise the rebound effect, the trap of "more efficient means less consumption"
- Place each technology in the business side, the plant side or both, with an example
- Identify the improvements they bring to IT and OT environments and to the connection between them
- Measure two real footprints in the browser: the carbon intensity of Mallorca's electricity and the estimated emissions of a website
Efficient and sustainable¶
An efficient economy gets the same result with fewer resources: energy, water, raw materials, time. A sustainable economy does it without compromising the future: environmental, economic and social.
The European Union talks about the twin transition: the digital transition and the green transition must move together, because they can reinforce each other, and they can also clash.
Face A: how the technologies help¶
| Technology | What it allows | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| IoT + big data | Measure energy and water use in real time; spot leaks and waste | You cannot reduce what you do not measure |
| AI | Predictive maintenance (anticipating failures from sensor data); optimising routes, loads, air conditioning, production | Fewer breakdowns, less fuel, less energy |
| Digital twins | Simulate a change before making it | Fewer physical tests, fewer costly mistakes |
| Additive manufacturing | Use material only where needed; print spare parts locally, on demand | Can reduce waste, transport and stock |
| Cloud | Share infrastructure among many customers in large data centres | Usually better used than many half-empty servers of your own |
| Blockchain | Trace the origin of products along the supply chain | Supports the circular economy and transparency |
Face B: the cost of digital¶
| Cost | What happens | A number to remember |
|---|---|---|
| Energy | Data centres use a lot of electricity, and AI is the main driver of its growth | About 415 TWh, around 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024 (International Energy Agency) |
| Water | Depending on the cooling system, data centres also consume water | It varies a lot by site and climate |
| Materials and waste | Devices need critical raw materials, and constant renewal generates e-waste | 62 million tonnes of e-waste in 2022, only 22.3% documented as properly collected and recycled (ITU and UNITAR) |
The rebound effect happens when making something more efficient and cheaper leads people to use more of it, so total consumption can end up rising.
Careful: \"digital is always greener\"
An app that saves paper but runs on servers switched on all day is not automatically more sustainable. Neither is it automatically worse. The only honest answer is to measure both sides, which is exactly what you will do in class today.
Business or plant?¶
Remember Unit 1: the business side is the offices, management and customer relations (IT systems); the plant side is where the product is made or the service is physically delivered (OT systems). In the city-builder, the city hall and the infrastructure.
| Technology | In the business | On the plant |
|---|---|---|
| IoT | Product usage data for sales and after-sales | Sensors on machines, installations, vehicles |
| Cloud | ERP, CRM, email and collaboration tools as a service | Platform where plant data are sent and analysed |
| AI | Sales forecasts, chatbots, fraud detection | Quality control by camera, predictive maintenance |
| Big data | Customer and market analysis | Analysis of process and production data |
| Cybersecurity | Protecting customer data and management systems | Protecting control systems: stopping them stops the plant |
| Blockchain | Contracts and certificates | Traceability of batches and raw materials |
| Robotics | Software robots (RPA) for admin tasks | Industrial robots, cobots, mobile robots |
| Additive manufacturing | Prototypes for design and marketing | Spare parts, tools, short runs |
| AR / VR | Sales demos, virtual visits | Maintenance assistance, operator training |
| 5G | Mobile work | Wireless connection of machines, vehicles, sensors |
| Digital twins | Simulating scenarios to decide investments | Replica of the line, the machine or the building |
What they improve in IT and OT¶
| Improvements in IT | Improvements in OT | Improvements from connecting IT and OT |
|---|---|---|
| Scale resources with demand; automate repetitive tasks; decide with data instead of intuition; work from anywhere | Fewer unplanned stops; more quality and less scrap; safer work for people; remote supervision and control | The business sees the plant in real time; the plant produces according to real demand; traceability from the order to the product |
An improvement only counts if you can check it. That is why every improvement in the report needs a KPI (key performance indicator): one number you would measure before and after. "Fewer stops" is vague; "unplanned stop hours per month" is a KPI.
In class: measure the footprint¶
Three short tasks in the browser, handed in as one document on Classroom (class activity, individual). These tools only look at public information, as any visitor does: passive only. No AI tools.
| Step | Do this | You should see |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Open Electricity Maps (app.electricitymaps.com), find the zone Mallorca and then Spain (mainland) |
The carbon intensity of each, in gCO₂eq/kWh, and the mix of sources right now |
| 2 | Write both numbers, the time, and the main source in each | Two different numbers: an island grid and a mainland grid are not the same |
| 3 | Open the Website Carbon Calculator (websitecarbon.com) and test your company's home page |
Grams of CO₂ per visit and whether the hosting appears as green |
| 4 | Check the same domain with the Green Web Foundation's Green Web Check | Whether the hosting provider is listed as running on green energy |
| 5 | Write two sentences: what the numbers suggest, and why they are estimates and not exact measurements | The calculator estimates from the page weight and average grid figures |
Then, for each technology of your section of Deliverable 2, write:
| Field | What to write |
|---|---|
| Business or plant | Business, plant or both; the exact department or process |
| Sustainability | One benefit and one cost, and what you would measure |
| IT / OT improvement | Which environment (IT, OT or the connection) and one KPI |
For your project¶
The three fields you just wrote are fields 3, 5 and 6 of your technology sheets in Deliverable 2 (criteria e, c and f). The two measurements of today are good evidence to quote in field 5: a real number with its source and date is worth more than a paragraph of good intentions. If your company publishes a sustainability report, cite it; if not, write that you looked for it and did not find it.
Key takeaways¶
- Efficient means the same result with fewer resources; sustainable means without compromising the future. The EU calls doing digital and green together the twin transition.
- Face A: IoT, data and AI measure and optimise consumption; predictive maintenance, digital twins and additive manufacturing reduce waste.
- Face B: data centres used about 1.5% of the world's electricity in 2024, and only 22.3% of the 62 million tonnes of e-waste of 2022 was documented as recycled.
- The rebound effect can turn efficiency into more total consumption: measure, do not assume.
- Every technology acts on the business side, the plant side or both, and improves IT, OT or the connection between them.
- An improvement needs a KPI: one number you would measure before and after.
Quick check¶
1. What is predictive maintenance?
- Repairing machines only after they break
- Replacing every part once a year, whatever its state
- Anticipating failures from sensor data before they happen
- Buying a new machine every five years
Predictive maintenance uses IoT data and analysis (often AI) to fix a machine just before it would fail: fewer breakdowns and less waste than repairing late or replacing early.
2. A company makes its delivery app so efficient that each delivery costs much less, and customers order three times as often. Total fuel use goes up. What is this called?
- Twin transition
- Rebound effect
- Servitisation
- Predictive maintenance
When efficiency makes something cheaper and people use much more of it, total consumption can rise: the rebound effect.
3. Which statement about the environmental cost of digital technologies is correct?
- Digital technologies have no environmental cost because they are virtual
- Data centres use electricity and sometimes water, and devices become e-waste
- Only cryptocurrencies consume energy
- All e-waste is recycled in Europe
Face B is real: about 1.5% of the world's electricity went to data centres in 2024, and most e-waste is not documented as properly recycled.
4. Which one is an enabling technology on the business side?
- A cloud CRM with AI that ranks which customers to call first
- IoT sensors watching the temperature of an oven
- A cobot that palletises boxes
- A 5G network connecting cranes in a port
The CRM serves sales and customer relations: offices, IT. The other three act on the physical operation: the plant.
5. Which improvement belongs to the OT environment?
- Scaling servers with demand without buying hardware
- Fewer unplanned machine stops
- Working from home with cloud tools
- Faster approval of invoices
Unplanned stops happen on the plant floor, so it is an OT improvement. The other three are IT improvements.
6. A student writes as the improvement of a technology: \"It will make the company more efficient.\" What is the best advice?
- It is perfect: efficiency is the goal
- Name the process and add a KPI you would measure before and after, such as litres lost per day
- Remove it: reports should not talk about improvements
- Add more technologies so the improvement is bigger
An improvement only counts if it can be checked. A KPI turns a vague promise into something the company can measure.
7. Your company's website shows a high CO₂ figure per visit in the Website Carbon Calculator. Pick the two sensible conclusions.
- It is an estimate based on the page weight and average figures, not an exact measurement
- It proves the company pollutes more than all its competitors
- Making the page lighter (smaller images, fewer scripts) would probably lower the estimate
- The company must be breaking the law
The calculator estimates emissions from data transferred, so a heavier page scores worse. It is useful for comparing and improving, not as proof of anything.
You now have every piece of the technology report. The last lesson is about putting it together well: finding sources you can trust, citing them and writing it as a team. Next: Writing the technology report.