Risks and Opportunities of Industry 4.0 for Corporate Sustainability

Abstract

Industry 4.0: digital technologies are changing the way industrial  production works. This digital informatization of industrial production opens up  opportunities for business informatics to develop sociotechnical solutions that  support companies in their transformation towards more sustainability. The main contribution of this paper is the presentation, contextualization and  controversial discussion of approaches identified in the literature, where digital  technologies might offer an opportunity to support corporate sustainability. As a  result the paper presents approaches where Industry 4.0 technologies support  corporate sustainability management on a general level, and more specifically  improve resource efficiency or enable Big Data approaches in order support  corporate environmental management.

Introduction

In recent years, digitalization has become ubiquitous in all areas of the economy and  society. Currently information and communication technology (ICT) networks  globally consume 1.2% of the total electricity grid supply [1] and digital technologies  emit around 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions – with an ascending trend [2].  

In the context of industrial production, digitalization is often associated with the term  Industry 4.0, which has gained wide recognition since its establishment in 2011, both  nationally and internationally. According to [3–6] the Industry 4.0 concept is based on processes in which both the manufacturing systems and the objects to be  manufactured are interconnected with each other through ICT and continuously  exchange data. The interacting manufacturing systems can be organized in a  decentralized manner and are enabled to flexibly organize and optimize themselves through digital technologies and so-called cyber-physical systems [3–6]. Industry 4.0  thus stands for a fundamental transformation of the manufacturing industry, which is  also taken up in countries such as China, USA, India and Japan indicating its global  impact.

At the same time, industry has a significant impact on key sustainability parameters:  according to the International Energy Agency, the sector accounted for 41.6% of  global electricity and even 79.8% of final coal consumption in 2016. As actors with  social responsibility, companies are also important for the transformation process  towards sustainable development. But companies also have an intrinsic motivation to  adapt their business operations towards more sustainability. Some of them are already forced to regularly report openly on their sustainability performance (e.g. big  companies through the Directive 2014/95/EU of the European Union on Non-financial and Diversity Information). Their sustainability performance is also  becoming a reputational factor in the decision making processes of on the one hand  potential customers [7] (whose decisions directly affect the economic success) but on  the other hand also of potential employees, who seek to give a meaning to their work  [8]. In summary it can be said, that society as a whole but also the companies  themselves are likely to benefit from their improved sustainability performance.

However, it is unclear whether and to what extent the emerging digitalization of  industrial production promotes – or even hinders – the transition towards  sustainability. Can digital technologies and the availability of huge amounts of data  also enable companies and their employees to operate more sustainable e. g. by  helping to design more environmentally friendly sociotechnical systems for corporate environments?  

This paper seeks to provide an overview on the question how Industry 4.0 can help to  harness currently untapped transformative potentials of sustainability management in  companies and thereby contribute to a sustainable way of doing business through  data-driven sociotechnical systems. The main contribution of this paper is the  presentation, contextualization and controversial discussion of approaches identified  in the literature, where Industry 4.0 technologies might offer an opportunity to support corporate sustainability.