Sustainability pillar - IoT Lens

Sustainability pillar

The sustainability pillar includes the ability to continually improve sustainability impacts by reducing energy consumption and increasing efficiency across all components of a workload by maximizing the benefits from the provisioned resources and minimizing the total resources required.

The term sustainability encompasses a wide range of factors such as economic viability, social equity, biodiversity, resilience, environmental impact, and more.  We will focus specifically on how to design your IoT solutions to improve sustainability by lowering their carbon footprint while simultaneously reducing operational costs.

Reducing carbon footprint is a key aspect of mitigating climate change, which is a pressing global environmental challenge.  One way to achieve this is to use resources in a responsible and efficient manner, minimize waste and maximize the use of renewable resources.  As described later in this paper, the actions taken to improve sustainability usually have a positive effect on operational costs, not just through resource efficiency, but also by optimizing operational processes.

While IoT solutions span the range from sensors and devices at the edge to applications in the cloud, this paper focuses largely on sustainability at the edge. Sustainability of and through the cloud is covered in the Sustainability Pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

It is important to recognize that the carbon footprint of an IoT device is distributed across its entire lifecycle, consisting of the design and build phase, the operational (in-use) phase, and the disposal phase.

  • The design and build phase deals with design, component sourcing, manufacturing, and other supply chain activities. This phase usually accounts for most of the carbon footprint associated with a device—referred to as the embodied carbon.

  • The operational phase of the device lifecycle has a significant carbon footprint impact as well.  The Reaching Net-Zero Carbon by 2040: Decarbonizing and Neutralizing the Use Phase of Connected Devices whitepaper shows that this phase accounts for 10-15% of the entire lifecycle carbon footprint for re-chargeable battery powered devices and 60-80% for plugged-in devices.

  • The disposal phase of IoT devices refers to the stage when a device is no longer needed or usable in operation. 

Implementing the best practices outlined here involves trade-offs between cost, reliability, performance, and carbon footprint. Your organization should examine these best practices, both holistically and individually, and agree on how to best meet your sustainability goals for each use case.