# Industrial Metaverse: A Comprehensive Review, Environmental Impact, and Challenges
## 5 Environmental Impact and Sustainable Development  
Although the IM brings amazing changes to industrial areas, this technology is still in its infancy and has a significant environmental impact. Any change in the quality of the environment, whether positive or negative, alters a system's natural flow of processes and constitutes an environmental impact [89; 90]. To achieve sustainable development, this event must be evaluated. End-to-end complex industrial system control is becoming increasingly important due to sustainability imperatives. The majority of developed nations aim to achieve net zero by 2040-2060. This implies that businesses must overcome the challenge of maintaining economic growth while achieving net-zero environmental impact. The IM is having an impact on the environment in many ways. This includes energy consumption, e-waste, virtual economies, blockchain technology, the elimination of activities that generate pollution, the reduction in the pollution caused by activities, a decrease in the consumption of physical objects, accurate assessment of the pollution generated, and enhanced enforcement and reward systems. An explanation of each way the environment is impacted is provided below:  
1. Energy consumption: It is anticipated that the servers and data centers needed to support the IM's development will consume a substantial amount of energy. This might result in a considerable rise in energy usage, especially if the Metaverse is widely deployed as predicted [91]. Figure 9 shows the global data centers wherein the number of data centers in a country is depicted. The U.S. has the highest number of data centers amounting to 2710, and the lowest number of data centers are found in Italy. Figure 10 shows the energy usage in terms of the power usage effectiveness (PUE). Global PUE has continued to decrease from the year 2006 when it was 2.5 until 2022 when it was 1.57. Although the Metaverse can reduce carbon emissions associated with travel, building, and maintaining infrastructure, the servers and data centers that power the Metaverse can also consume significant energy. Given the IM's early stages, the impact of energy consumption still needs further investigation. However, cloud computing and data centers are the main tools of the IM data centers, which are large groups of connected enterprise servers frequently used to store, process, or transmit large quantities of data. This means data centers use a large amount of electricity, which leads to several environmental issues. In one of the few major cases, the amount of energy consumed over the years was examined using the TRUBA dataset. This dataset includes the daily energy consumption of supercomputers, storage, and networking devices. TRUBA's forecast results point to a reduction in energy consumption in the future. Furthermore, the same study also shows that the energy consumption of TRUBA is decreasing, but it must be noted that the usage of cloud servers for deep learning tasks is increasing [93]. Ensuring that the underlying infrastructure supporting the Metaverse is powered by renewable energy sources is key to achieving overall net zero. 2. e-Waste: Electronic waste (e-waste) has significantly increased because of the growing need for the latest technology, posing an environmental threat. A case in point is the innovation in cellular phones that has adopted the digital part IM. Innovation is an expensive endeavor that requires much trial and error and produces waste in various forms. The digital part industry can reduce waste, conserve resources, and accelerate  
Figure 10: Global PUE. Figure 9: Global data centers [92]. innovation cycles by moving the innovation process to the Internet of Medical Things. Faster innovation does, however, result in shorter product lifetimes, which increases waste and obsolescence. Consider the smartphone market, which is expected to sell more than 1.7 billion units by 2021.