Is e-reading environmentally more sustainable than conventional reading?

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• 作者：Harish K. Jeswani (1)
  Adisa Azapagic (1)
  
  1. School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science ; The University of Manchester ; The Mill ; Sackville Street ; Manchester ; M13 9PL ; UK
  
• 关键词：Books ; E ; books ; E ; paper ; Newspapers ; LCA ; Carbon footprint
• 刊名：Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy
• 出版年：2015
• 出版时间：March 2015
• 年：2015
• 卷：17
• 期：3
• 页码：803-809
• 全文大小：511 KB
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• 刊物类别：Engineering
• 刊物主题：Industrial and Production Engineering
  Industrial Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
  Industrial Pollution Prevention
  Environmental Economics
  
• 出版者：Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
• ISSN：1618-9558

文摘

Technology is changing the way we read, with printed material being replaced by electronically published text such as e-books and e-newspapers. Although digitally published texts offer some advantages over printed material in terms of cost and ease of access, it is not immediately clear whether e-reading is environmentally a more sustainable alternative to conventional reading. Therefore, this paper reviews the literature and compares the environmental impacts of the two reading alternatives, taking a life cycle approach. The review of various studies indicates that there are large variations in the impacts for e-readers as well as the printed material, mainly owing to different assumptions. Nevertheless, the results of this work indicate clearly that e-reading can only be environmentally sustainable at very high usage rates, as manufacturing of e-readers has relatively high environmental impacts.