End-user perspectives on environmental sustainability and communication - Case study on media use

The environmental impacts of media use is a combination of the impacts related to use phase, manufacturing of the devices or platforms used, content creation, and infrastructure required for delivering the content to the end-user. For making environmentally aware decisions, the impacts of these different phases should be clarified. The phases of the life cycle of media services were divided into a fourfold table to provide structure for the assessments and to illustrate the roles of the stakeholders in the media value network. Several challenges in composing data on environmental impacts of media use and communicating it to consumers were identified: The existing information is not easily available for consumers and a lot of background knowledge would be needed to interpret the results for decision making. Consumers don't generally pay attention to the invisible consumption related to digital media and they have little information of the factors affecting environmental impacts.