article · Applied Sciences
The industrial metaverse integrates technologies such as augmented and mixed reality to enhance business operations, streamline workflows, and reduce error rates. While it provides opportunities to lower carbon emissions by substituting physical activities like travel and construction with digital alternatives, it also incurs notable environmental costs. The underlying infrastructure, including data centres, networks, and intensive computing, generates substantial energy consumption, e-waste, and pollution. A synthesis of current research indicates that although negative impacts exist, most industrial metaverse applications currently trend towards net positive environmental sustainability. To manage these trade-offs effectively, enterprises can adopt renewable energy sources and cloud-based services, whilst addressing emerging data security and privacy risks. Ultimately, achieving sustainability in these virtual industrial environments requires balancing rapid technological adoption with deliberate environmental stewardship, circular economy principles, and reduced resource footprints.
As industrial organisations adopt immersive virtual environments to remain competitive, understanding the real ecological cost is vital. Digital transformation offers significant operational gains and can reduce physical resource consumption. However, the heavy computational demands also create substantial energy and waste burdens. Clarifying these environmental trade-offs helps decision-makers deploy digital tools responsibly while working towards net zero and sustainability targets.
The review examines enterprise applications across workflow management, industrial operations, and construction substitution, targeted at corporate decision-makers and industrial technology developers. The findings reflect early-stage to deployed industrial metaverse systems described across academic literature. While commercial adoption is already emerging, widespread sustainable uptake depends on overcoming significant data privacy concerns, infrastructure energy overheads, and integrating renewable power sources into supporting cloud architectures.
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The Industrial Metaverse paradigm can be broadly described as a virtual environment that integrates various technologies such as augmented reality and mixed reality to enhance business operations and processes. It aims to streamline workflows, reduce error rates, improve efficiency, and provide a more engaging experience for employees. The promise of the Industrial Metaverse to drive sustainability and resource efficiency is compelling. Using advanced technologies such as the Industrial Metaverse is vital in an endeavor to have a competitive edge in a rapidly evolving business environment. However, the environmental impact of the technologies underpinning the Industrial Metaverse, like data centers and network infrastructure, should not be overlooked. The ecological footprint of these technologies must be considered in the sustainability equation. Researchers have warned that, by 2025, without sustainable artificial intelligence (AI) practices, AI will consume more energy than the human workforce, significantly offsetting zero carbon gains. As the Metaverse persists in evolving and gaining momentum, it will be necessary for companies to prioritize sustainability and explore new ways to balance technological advancements with environmental stewardship. However, recent studies have conjectured that the Metaverse holds the potential to reduce carbon emissions, as digital replacements for physical goods become more prevalent and physical activities like mobility and construction are reduced. Moreover, the specific extent to which this substitution can alleviate environmental concerns remains an open issue, presenting a knowledge gap in understanding the real-world impact of digital replacements. Thus, the objective of this paper is to provide a comprehensive review of the Industrial Metaverse, as well as explore the environmental impact of the Industrial Metaverse. The integrative literature review design and methodological approach involved multiple sources from the Web of Science and databases such as the ACM library, IEEE Library, and Google Scholar, which were analyzed to provide a comprehensive understanding of the developments in the Industrial Metaverse. Firstly, by considering the Industrial Metaverse’s architecture, we elucidate the Industrial Metaverse concept and the associated enabling technologies. Secondly, we performed an exploration through a discussion of the prevalent use cases and the deployment of the emerging Industrial Metaverse. Thirdly, we explored the impact of the Industrial Metaverse on the environment. Lastly, we address novel security and privacy risks, as well as upcoming research challenges, keeping in mind that the Industrial Metaverse is based on a strong data fabric. The results point to the Industrial Metaverse as having both positive and negative environmental effects in terms of energy consumption, e-waste, and pollution. Research, however, indicates that most Industrial Metaverse applications have a positive environmental impact and subsequently trend toward sustainability. Finally, for sustainability in the Industrial Metaverse, enterprises may consider utilizing renewable energy sources and cloud services. Furthermore, we examined the effects of products on the environment, as well as in the creation of a circular economy.
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DOI: 10.3390/app14135736
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