The Internet of Things (IoT) is a proposition that is here to stay as more and more everyday objects get networked together as sensors get smaller and more ubiquitous. This progression towards IoT has implications for the environment, for better and for worse. A multitude of small sensors can provide information about car emissions, power usage, CO2 levels, erosion and even weather patterns. Alternatively, the proliferation of smaller electronic devices means an oncoming tsunami of e-waste that needs to be tracked (potentially another IoT application) and recycled or otherwise handled.

Today, Friday the 22nd of April, is Earth Day, a movement directed towards raising consciousness about environmental issues across the world. As technology advances, so must the understanding of how that technology affects both humanity and the world.

“In the next 5 years, we expect two-thirds of all electronics will have some connectivity in them,” Hans Vestberg, CEO of Ericsson (Telefonaktiebolaget L. M. Ericsson), said during the at the CTIA Wireless 2011 conference in Orlando, Fla. “That means we can use a much more powerful grid in our society and reduce our impact on the environment drastically.”

Over those past five years, IoT has expanded dramatically, with an estimated 22.9 billion connected devices online in 2016 up from 8.7 billion connected devices in 2012 (according to Statista). This is only expected to skyrocket to over 50.1 billion devices by 2020 and Cisco Systems, Inc. pegged a value of approximately $14.4 billion for the entire industry by 2022.

Making energy use more efficient for people and cities alike

According to Electric Light & Power, IoT technology has already begun to infiltrate city power grids and infrastructure providing for a better understanding of power use and thus reduce waste.

“By 2013, the U.S. had nearly 52 million advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) installations (defined as having at least hourly measurement of electricity usage, two-way communication and remote utility management), of which 89 percent were residential,” EL&P notes.

The article also cites the increased number of “smart” devices designed for homes that work with thermostats, lighting, in-home energy monitoring and other appliances (controlled by smartphones). EL&P calls this a triad of “collection, communication and coordination,” which at various scales (from home, to power grid, to city, to nation) allows for a better understand of efficient power use.

Solutions connecting IoT networks to smart grids continue to roll out such the Pecan Street Project in Texas, a residential power-grid experiment that uses IoT, solar panels and power distributive technologies to reduce power use and increase efficiency. Then there’s the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC), founded in 2014 by AT&T, Cisco, IBM, General Electric and Intel, that is currently experimenting with connecting IoT to microgrids as well.

Open Energi Ltd., a British energy startup, has been connecting machines and appliances to the Internet even before IoT was a thing. The team at Open Energi has seen spectacular results in reducing energy use and making systems more efficient by increasing communication—and IoT provides the capability to coordinate and orchestrate even larger systems.

Every year more vehicles become connected to cellular networks (or through cell phones) giving greater access for cities to understand patterns of traffic. When it comes to pollution, vehicular traffic is a massive producer of emissions and the more efficient the car and the less rough the route—say fewer traffic jams and less congestion—the less pollutants produced by cars. This is the idea behind Cisco Systems, Inc.’s Smart+Connected Traffic project.

Electric and hybrid cars certainly come into play here, but that’s what the smart grid IoT will assist.

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Monitoring the environment

Utilizing the Internet of Things to make the environment safer, reduce waste and make energy use more efficient is one side—but another side is monitoring how humans affect the environment and watching how the environment may affect humans. These are potentially two sides of the same coin.

In Texas, civil engineers and emergency personnel use Microsoft Corp.’s Azure cloud to connect together thousands of sensors to help predict floods at a local level. At the same time, researchers in Brazil make use of over 700 remote sensors in the region’s cloud forests watching for changes in the microclimates that may predict significant changes to the ecology.

Air quality is very important to humans (and pretty much everything that breathes from trees to squirrels) so monitoring it is very important. This is what’s behind a push for IoT sensors from Bitfinder, Inc.,  indoor-outdoor weather stations from Netatmo and wearable environmental trackers from TZOA (quick and dirty details available from Fast Company).

The IoT approach for this comes two-fold: one is for consumers, who want mapping of air quality around their city and neighborhood; and the other is for governments, which want to keep pollution down and understanding where and when it rises and falls can lead to better understanding how to tackle it.

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The dangers of IoT to Mother Nature must be mitigated somehow

While IoT offers all of these wonderful potential solutions to human-generated problems with energy inefficiency, pollution and waste—IoT itself has a potential e-waste problem that needs addressing.

According to Do Something.org, e-waste represents 2 percent of America’s trash, but represents 70 percent of overall toxic waste. As more low-powered devices become connected, their durability and recyclability comes into question; furthermore, appliances and items ordinarily without sophisticated electronics will get IoT sensors/systems that will contribute to this when discarded.

In an article for Intel’s IoT Solution Provider blog, Pierre DeBois argued that this problem is something that anyone advocating for IoT’s capability as an environment salve must address. Instead of shrinking the footprint and weight on the environment, the increase in use of these devices may drown landfills and recycling centers in difficult-to-handle materials. (Materials that would be best returned for manufacturing rather than being leeched into the soil or buried in piles of garbage.)

Right now, it’s very hard to tell where this will go because it’s difficult to tell what the industry is doing. Many factors come together when it comes to the lifecycle of a product: will it be proprietary and tied to a service that will vanish (ended with the device thrown in the trash), will it have fixed firmware that can’t be changed when a security issue happens (ditto) and what happens when its version becomes obsolete and how fast (ditto). The durability of the product physically is only one part of its lifecycle when it comes to how the user will keep or discard it for the next model.

Businesses may right now be looking to IoT to make the world a better place, but to be proper stewards of the environment, the business of IoT must remain proper curators of the entire lifecycle of these products from factor floor to landfill (or, hopefully, recycling center).

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