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ICT-Enabled Sharing Economy and Environmental Sustainability—A Resource-Oriented Approach

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Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics

Part of the book series: Progress in IS ((PROIS))

Abstract

Information and communication technology (ICT) has transformed our consumption patterns. The widespread use of smart devices has enabled practicing a wide variety of “sharing economy” activities, a development that brings new ways of resource consumption to our everyday life. The increasing participation in sharing economy activities calls for studies that research the sustainability of this new consumption trend. Although the concept is associated with a more collaborative resource consumption, this may in practice be limited to some resources being shared. The present paper sets the stage for better understanding of the ICT-enabled sharing economy in the context of environmental sustainability. In this work, we present a line of thought that starts with perceiving resource sharing as the core of the sharing economy and continue with a sustainability analysis using a conceptual framework of ICT impacts on sustainability. This study provides a first step towards conceptualizing the sharing economy in a sustainability context and delineates further analysis of the sustainability of digital sharing.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Studies can be found (e.g. [31]) that suggest Airbnb is more sustainable than traditional travel lodging as it consumes less resources and produces less waste.

  2. 2.

    The relationship between software characteristics and the demand for natural resources for manufacturing its adequate hardware has received less attention in scientific studies [8]. This is also the case with the sharing economy in which the relationship between its software applications and the required resources for the hardware in the entire system has not been studied to date. First steps into the direction of addressing software sustainability with regard to natural resources have been done by Guldner et al. [38] and Kern [39].

  3. 3.

    For more on the ICT implications for energy consumption see [40, 42,43,44,45,46].

  4. 4.

    In addition to induction effects and optimization effects are obsolescence effects and substitution effects with the former referring to the case where “ICT can shorten the useful life of another resource due to incompatibility”, and the latter where “the use of ICT replaces the use of another resource [8, p. 21].

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Zürich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Maria J. Pouri & Lorenz M. Hilty

  2. Technology and Society Lab, Empa Materials Science and Technology, Dübendorf, Switzerland

    Lorenz M. Hilty

Authors
  1. Maria J. Pouri
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  2. Lorenz M. Hilty
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maria J. Pouri .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, Technical University of Munich, Garching near Munich, Germany

    Hans-Joachim Bungartz

  2. Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Garching near Munich, Germany

    Dieter Kranzlmüller

  3. Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Garching near Munich, Germany

    Volker Weinberg

  4. Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Garching near Munich, Germany

    Jens Weismüller

  5. Department of Engineering - Technology and Life, HTW Berlin - University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, Germany

    Volker Wohlgemuth

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Pouri, M.J., Hilty, L.M. (2018). ICT-Enabled Sharing Economy and Environmental Sustainability—A Resource-Oriented Approach. In: Bungartz, HJ., Kranzlmüller, D., Weinberg, V., Weismüller, J., Wohlgemuth, V. (eds) Advances and New Trends in Environmental Informatics. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99654-7_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-99654-7_4

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