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The IoT and Sustainable Engineering
Design Trends and the Transformation of Everything

Read the full Design Trends eZine:

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By Knud Lueth for Mouser Electronics

Many blame the technological innovations of the past 150 years for the sustainability challenges we face today, but it is just as true that technology has a key role in building a more sustainable world. To understand why this is, you need to understand exactly what is meant by sustainability.

Sustainability is the balance among four elements: Resource exploitation, investment direction, technological development, and institutional change. All four must be in harmony while they enhance both current and future human needs. In 2015, the United Nations (UN) released 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which provide an excellent starting point for sustainability. They include high-level goals such as “no poverty,” “zero hunger,” and “affordable and clean energy,” which are then further broken down into more detailed objectives such as “creating new agricultural practices” and “improving the global rate of energy efficiency.”

Sustainable Engineering

Engineers play an important role in achieving these goals through “sustainable engineering,” which includes methods such as life-cycle analysis, pollution prevention, Design for the Environment (DfE), design for disassembly, and design for recycling. The question for designers and engineers is not how and where they fit in a sustainable design process but whether the complete process has been considered with sustainability in mind.

One area where engineers are having a big impact now is through connected devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Research shows that IoT technology is contributing tremendously toward many sustainability goals, mostly through new business models and use cases enabled by the IoT. We analyzed more than 600 IoT deployments, ranging from smart factories to smart agriculture and smart grids. The result: Eighty-four percent of existing IoT deployments can address the 17 SDGs that the UN has laid out.

Why is the IoT having such a big impact? At its core, the IoT is about measuring and remotely controlling previously unconnected “things.” It reaches people and objects that older technology could not. However, when you look at some of the key use cases, you can see how important the IoT is for our sustainable future. Some of the most promising cases focus on IoT in smart cities and agriculture.

Many cities are currently installing IoT-enabled sensors that continuously collect and transmit environmental data such as air quality, carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, noise, and other information—a crucial step for taking the right actions to make cities cleaner and quieter. Another use case is smart parking. New IoT-enabled smart parking solutions help people find appropriate parking spaces more quickly, reducing road congestion while at the same time reducing CO2 emissions.

In agriculture, smart irrigation systems save a lot of water. IoT sensors and controllers not only facilitate exact monitoring of water usage but also enable remote shutoffs and more accurate monitoring of where and how much water is actually needed.

Smart water is now a focal point, not only for irrigation but also for water consumption monitoring and usage by people around the world. I spent part of last summer in Cape Town, South Africa, where I witnessed firsthand frustration, as the city almost ran out of water while having limited insight into who the biggest water users were. IoT solutions such as automated water metering will have a positive effect on such issues, creating sustainability.

Quantifying Sustainability

One of the challenges facing engineers who build sustainability into their design and engineering process is the potential negative sustainability impacts of IoT technology. Every sensor and controller we deploy consumes resources, including raw materials and energy. With billions of new devices expected to hit the market, the quantity will be significant. As such, part of the design process will involve determining the net negative or positive impact of an engineered solution, which raises another engineering challenge: How do you quantify sustainability?

Measuring sustainability is not easy. First, you must determine whether the solution at hand improves any of the SDGs the UN has laid out and how the improvements are expected to unfold. This analysis should also include the scale of the solution’s deployment. Several standard bodies provide frameworks for measuring sustainability, including the Global Reporting Initiative, the International Organization for Standardization, and the CDP (originally named the Carbon Disclosure Project, this non-profit now works with industries to study climate impact). These frameworks mainly target global corporate activity and general business models and are of limited value to engineers working on specific engineering problems and who want clear, actionable guidelines they can apply to their product designs.

Still, engineers can dig into these frameworks for more specific guidance. For example, the DfE framework includes a concept called design for energy efficiency, which is particularly relevant for today’s engineers. It looks at ways to design a product to minimize overall energy consumption throughout the product’s life. With the IoT, we now have communication methods such as low-power, wide-area wireless technologies, which allow for much lower power

consumption and battery usage than traditional cellular networks. There are also strategies such as energy harvesting through small solar cells or similar technologies that can completely change the energy efficiency equation of a device or solution.

Engineers should also consider the components they use in their IoTdevice designs. Some components are clearly more sustainable than others. For example, components that contribute to sustainability include:

• Anything that uses energy harvesting
• Components that use low-powered communication technologies
• Components that use edge computing to filter and process data locally rather than consuming power to transmit data to a powerhungry cloud computing resource
• Components that avoid hazardous substances by incorporating sustainable materials (e.g., using conductive adhesives or other lead substitutes rather than soldering a component assembly)

Using sustainable components is not always possible, though. Sometimes, it is not even the solution’s biggest contribution to sustainability. Sustainable components are important, but engineers also need to consider the larger context of their designs. IoT solutions, for example, can contribute enormously to sustainability because they make new, more sustainable business models possible.

Conclusion

For engineers interested in learning more about using IoT devices in sustainable design and how to become involved in sustainable design initiatives, many resources are available. At the corporate level, the World Economic Forum has several initiatives related to the IoT and sustainability. We work together with them to help firms around the world lead the discussion on how they can get started.

Hands-on engineers may be more interested in the working groups that engineering organizations offer. For instance, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has an initiative called Sustainable ICT. The German engineering association VDI has a guideline called Nachhaltiges Wirtschaften, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers has a website dedicated to sustainability (https://www.asme.org/engineeringtopics/sustainability). In addition, many universities, including Purdue and Georgia Tech, have research teams devoted to the topic of sustainable engineering.

Now is a great time to further sustainability. The emergence of smart IoT devices is creating much-needed opportunities for building a more sustainable world.

Knud Lasse Lueth is the founder and CEO of IoT Analytics, a leading market research firm focused on the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0. For the last 10+ years, he has been working with numerous IoT software and hardware companies as well as technology endusers. His primary focus is on helping firms identify the next big trends, and then turning these insights into actionable strategies. Among other things, Knud is a co-author of the “Internet of Things Guidelines for Sustainability,” published by the World Economic Forum in January 2018, and prior to founding IoT Analytics, Knud worked at the Boston Consulting Group, BMW, and Lufthansa Technik.