iEMSs 2008: International Congress on Environmental Modelling and Software Integrating Sciences and Information Technology for Environmental Assessment and Decision Making 4 th Biennial Meeting of iEMSs, http://www.iemss.org/iemss2008/index.php?n=Main.Proceedings M. Sànchez-Marrè, J. Béjar, J. Comas, A. Rizzoli and G. Guariso (Eds.) International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs), 2008 Informatics and the Life Cycle of Products Lorenz M. Hilty , Roland Hischier, Thomas F. Ruddy, Claudia Som Technology and Society Lab, Empa – Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research, St. Gallen, Switzerland (lorenz.hilty@empa.ch) Abstract: Informatics can make a relevant contribution to sustainable development, if the effects of ICT applications are systematically assessed from a life-cycle perspective and the results of life-cycle assessment (LCA) studies are taken into account by decision makers. The basic scheme of a product life cycle includes the three phases production, use and end of life. In the production phase, raw materials are transformed into the product. In the use phase, the product delivers the service it has been intended for. After the service life of the product ends, parts of the product may be reused or recycled. The rest leaves the system for final disposal or to be recycled in other product systems. Only if life-cycle thinking is applied both to ICT products and to products influenced by ICT applications, is it possible to decide whether a potential ICT application will have a positive or negative environmental impact on the bottom line. With life-cycle thinking, it will be possible to make substantial steps toward sustainable development. Informatics, and in particular environmental informatics as a specialized sub-discipline of it, can contribute to life-cycle thinking by supporting the modelling and data collection process in LCA studies. In addition, dynamic simulation models are useful in prospective technology assessment where LCA methodology reaches its limits. Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA); ICT and sustainability; ICT and energy efficiency; life cycle inventory database; life cycle modelling; environmental informatics. 1. INTRODUCTION The discipline of Informatics (the analysis and design of information processing systems) and its technology (Information and Communication Technology, ICT), have various relationships to the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), i.e. cradle-to-grave accounting of the energy and material flows into and from the environment: 1. Each ICT hardware product has a life cycle which can be assessed with standard LCA methodology and tools. Example: The life-cycle of a PC can be modelled using an LCA tool (such as Umberto [ifu, 2008]) and a life cycle inventory database as a data source (such as ecoinvent 2.0 [ecoinvent Centre, 2008]). 2. Each application of an ICT product has various impacts on the life cycle of other products. Example: MP3 players have an impact on the demand for audio CDs, for CD players, for CD racks, on headphones, on the use of PCs for Internet access (music downloads), etc. 3. ICT applications support life-cycle thinking and thus contribute to sustainable development. Examples: Software tools for life-cycle modelling as well as life-cycle inventory databases help to understand product life cycles and bring the effort needed to do an LCA study down. Such tools can be viewed as applications of environmental informatics [Hilty et al., 2006c]. The following sections give a conceptual overview of each of the three aspects, including examples of existing studies and tools.