NEWSPRINT VS ONLINE NEWS

One swedish study investigated the long-term environmental impact of a habit of reading the news for a half an hour a day, comparing printed newspapers to reading online.

Taking European averages for different environmental impact indicators, the study concluded that the environmental impact of a printed newspaper was worse, even if only from the aspect of energy consumption. Reading a newspaper online is worse when only taking into account the generation of toxins or the carbon footprint. But the overall global impact of online news is less than half if one reads it for less than 10 minutes, and it is nearly halved if one considers only the case of Sweden. One of the biggest differences is that Sweden produces much of it's electricity in hydroelectric plants and much less in nuclear plants and burning fossil fuels. The study took into account many possible sources of environmental impact but also left out others (for lack of data), such as web infrastructure (servers, routers, etc.).

There are many studies examining these same questions, some come to similar conclusions, while others get conflicting results. It is impossible to come to some kind of definite conclusion on this. However, we can come to some common sense conclusions about what causes more harm to the environment, which according to this study, are this following:

• In the case of newsprint, the paper itself has the biggest impact on the environment.
• In the case of reading an online newspaper on a preexisting computer, energy consumption has the biggest impact.
• In the case of reading the paper on an electronic reader for ebooks, it's the manufacture of the device itself.
• In all of these, the main environmental impacts come from electricity use.