Environmental Impacts of Appropriate Technology: The System Boundaries

In rural development, health becomes a critical issue. As a means to improve their quality of life, rural people have applied technological solutions; however, many technologies impose high environmental impacts, meaning that rural health would be affected both in near and far futures. Due to local limited circumstance in rural communities, Appropriate Technology (AT) emerges as a comprehensive solution with less environmental impacts. Thus, research on environmental impacts of AT has become an emerging field of study. In such kind of research, positioning is taken into two different focuses: impacts imposed in AT usage, and complete overview throughout life-cycle. Both are founded on the understanding to put AT for having less environmental impacts by design. Therefore, the system boundary incorporates all phases of AT life-cycle. There are three groups of observation, each with different observed phenomena. General overview is provided to understand each phenomenon. The positioning become foundation of observation, and the system boundary acts as the precise basis of calculation.