1 Introduction and overview
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A first session was on digital transformation, introducing the concept of digital sobriety while highlighting potential risks and opportunities of increased digitization and provided a glimpse at the digital media use of young people in Switzerland (more details in Section 2).
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The second session addressed the resource use associated with digital transformation focusing on material and energy consumption as well as recycling of technology-critical elements in the context of a circularity (Section 3).
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The third session included a wide range of short presentations covering issues such as data centres as driver for industrial carbon reduction (Louise Mattson, RISE SICS North), the environmental assessment of cloud services in data centers (Ran Liu, Öko-Institut e.V.), the global energy footprint of IoT semiconductors (Sujit Das, Oak Ridge National Laboratory), synergies between blockchain technology and LCA (René Itten, Zurich University of Applied Sciences), electronics in the ecoinvent database (Lucia Valsasina, ecoinvent) and environmental implications of service life extension of mobile devices in the context of the ongoing project “Lifesaving” (Yann Blumer, Zurich University of Applied Sciences).
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The 1-day event was concluded in the afternoon with two sessions focusing on the challenges for the LCA methodology as well as the industrial perspectives from device manufacturers, addressing the inclusion of rebound effects, the multifunctionality of modern ICT devices and its inherent difficulties for LCA and the different LCA approaches applied by the device manufacturers (Sections 4 and 5).
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The discussion forum was framed with an online survey at the beginning and the end of the event that showed the participants’ view on the effect of the digital transformation on the global environmental footprint (Section 6).