[Air-L] effect of Internet on paper consumption?

Laur Kanger morgoth at ut.ee
Sun Sep 30 23:23:36 PDT 2007


If talking about sustainable development vis-a-vis internet commerce and
the use of paper, have You considered taking a wider perspective in
account? For example, even if studies WOULD show that e-commerce does
reduce the use of paper (as I see, there have been some works that cast
some doubts on that fact), the overall impact of ecological cost of
producing and constant renewing of ICT's and the infrastructure involved
might still render the positive results (in terms of paper use) negative.

I think it was in Dordoy, A. & Mellor, M. (2001). Ch 68 „Grassroots
Environmental Movements: Mobilisation in an Information Age”. In
„Manuel Castells. Volume III. From the Informational City to the
Information Age” (2004), eds F. Webster & B. Dimitriou. London:
Sage, pp 248-264, where the authors cited Harpold & Philip who said
something along the lines "the environmental impact of producing ICTs is
very hard to assess". They didnät get to the bottom of the problem
though...

Sincerely,
Laur Kanger

>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hang Ryeol Na [mailto:nhr24 at hotmail.com]
> Sent: Sunday, 30 September 2007 9:35 AM
> To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
> Subject: [Air-L] effect of Internet on paper consumption?
>
> Dear all,
>
> I am preparing to write a paper about the effect of internet commerce on
> paper consumption in terms of sustainable development.
> As there has been a lot of debate on whether the internet decreased or
> increased paper consumption, for example, paperless office, online bill
> and payment, etc. I am interested in what factors contributed to the
> increase and what others to the decrease.
>
> Do you have any information, or can you provide any resource of the data
> showing the effect of internet on paper consumption?
>
> If there are any statistics of companies which saved the cost by, for
> example, making the customers move from the traditional paper bill to
> online bill, it would be great. It would be even greater if any analysis
> is available of what made or did not make it possible to save the cost
> in such a way. I need to understand why there are both success and
> failure in such cases. My focus is on how to decrease the paper
> consumption with internet, or, whether it is feasible or not.
>
> Thanks for your consideration.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> Hang Ryeol Na
>
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