The “dark side” of Industry 4.0: How to make technology more sustainable?

Recent literature has identified several positive sustainability performance impacts of Industry 4.0 technologies in manufacturing companies. Some authors suggest that new technologies such as Internet of Things, sensors, and big data analytics can facilitate waste reduction and monitor manufacturing energy consumption, leading to energy savings (Bai et al., 2020). In contrast, a few studies have already identified various tradeoffs for some aspects of environmental and social sustainability dimensions. For example, scholars indicate that a fully automated production could lead to higher primary resource consumption, and cloud technologies could produce the loss of employees’ autonomy due to continuous data sharing used for decision making. Nevertheless, empirical research on the negative sustainability effects of Industry 4.0 is still scarce and anecdotal (Beltrami et al., 2021). Thus, the goals of this study are: (1) to identify the possible negative impacts of the new digital technologies (e.g., autonomous robots, cloud technologies, Internet of Things, and additive manufacturing) on firms’ environmental and social sustainability aspects; (2) to highlight the motivations and mechanisms behind them; and (3) to identify possible firm-level corrective actions that companies might implement to mitigate these negative effects.