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Is e-reading environmentally more sustainable than conventional reading?

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. To enable comparison among different studies, the original values reported in the literature have been converted in this paper to express them per kg of printed material. For the original functional units and assumptions, see the Appendix.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science, The University of Manchester, The Mill, Sackville Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Harish K. Jeswani & Adisa Azapagic

Authors
  1. Harish K. Jeswani
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  2. Adisa Azapagic
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Adisa Azapagic.

Appendix: The assumptions in the reviewed LCA studies

Appendix: The assumptions in the reviewed LCA studies

See Tables 1, 2.

Table 1 Printed material
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Table 2 E-readers
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Jeswani, H.K., Azapagic, A. Is e-reading environmentally more sustainable than conventional reading?. Clean Techn Environ Policy 17, 803–809 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-014-0851-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-014-0851-3

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