Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and IT industries are a popular field of investigation. Plepys (
2002
)
and Tulbure (
2002
), for instance, discuss under the concept of rebound
effects the environmental consequences of increasing consumption and
production of ICT products and services, relating these consequences
to both the life cycle of ICT products and the way these products are
used. In a similar way, Berg (
2003
) argues that the concept of a paper-
less office is rebounded by the fact that through ICT a written office let-
ter is printed out eight times on average before it is sent. Romm (
1999
)
assesses the energy use of the Information Age economy and, hence, its
effect on global warming. Smith, Sonnenfeld and Pellow (
2006
) bring
together numerous studies on what the production of ICT equipment
does to labour, health and the environment in a large number of coun-
tries throughout the world. More general evaluations on the ecology
of the new economy are given by Park and Roome (
2002
), Grubler
et al. (
2002
) and Brown (
2001
). The work of Heinonen et al. (
2001
)
is an example of a borderline study. They start their analysis with the
environmental side effects of information technology, but turn this into
preventive action in developing the idea of a sustainable Information
Society, referring to the necessity and possibilities of greening the ICT
sector. At the other side of the same research paradigm we can iden-
tify analyses of the contribution of ICT to dematerialisation, imma-
terialisation and sustainable development, for instance, by lowering
paper use (often not being proved); reducing travelling behaviour as a
result of distant learning, teleconferencing, teleworking and commut-
ing and the like; fine-tuning production processes or replacing mate-
rial consumption by virtual consumption (for instance, in tourism).
Dematerialisation is than conceived as the progressive gains in eco-
efficiency, especially via improvements in production; immaterialisa-
tion is defined as a radical sudden shift towards nonmaterial products
to fulfil human needs initially fulfilled by material products, especially
in the domain of consumption (Simmons,
2002
). Although the sustain-
ability prospects of ICT (or Information Society Technologies IST, as
the EU prefers to call them in their sixth R&D framework program)
are usually considered large, the actual achievements in terms of envi-
ronmental improvements are still modest. A special issue of
The Jour-
nal of Industrial Ecology
8
completely focused on these direct negative
8
Volume 6 (2002), no. 2, has papers that dive into the environmental effects of
ICT in sectors as diverse as travelling, e-commerce, the retail sector, the media
and the energy sector.
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