How to evaluate and communicate the environmental impacts of consumer's media use

Currently, some information about the environmental impacts of different devices and platforms, such as print, tablets and mobile phones is available, but the overall view related to media consumption as a whole is missing. 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. From LCA point of view, the challenge is how to select a correct functional unit for the evaluation, since the daily time used for e.g. reading the news varies greatly between the case persons. Most likely, a combination of LCA and other evaluation methods is required, increasing the complexity of the assessment. From consumer communication point of view, the challenge is that the impacts of media use are mostly not visible to the users and at the moment, the impacts are not well known.