Digital Sustainability Solutions: Expanding the Toolkit For Environmentally Sustainable Outcomes

While the research on digital sustainability highlights how new technologies address environmental challenges, we lack a systematic understanding of the pathways through which digital technologies deliver environmentally sustainable outcomes. This study fills the gap by advancing a conceptual model of “digital sustainability solutions” (DSSs)—action pathways through which digital affordances are actualized for environmental sustainability. Our model makes three contributions. First, it advances our understanding of the multiple ways in which digital technologies deliver environmentally sustainable outcomes. Second, our synthesis illustrates how four classes of technology affordances (impact assessment, informed collective formation, behavioral modification, and spatial transcendence) actualize through four action domains (structure, resources, mindset, and interactions) toward three environmental sustainability goals (resource efficiency, waste control, and emission reduction). Third, our use of a real-world example, along with the identification of boundary conditions, illustrates the utility of DSSs as a toolkit to turn organizations and their relationships into a sustainable ecosystem.