Environmental implications of wireless technologies: news delivery and business meetings.
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Date
2004-06-30
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Abstract
Wireless information technologies are providing new ways to communicate and are one of several information and communication technologies touted as an opportunity to reduce society s overall environmental impacts However rigorous system wide environmental impact comparisons of these technologies to the traditional applications they may replace have only recently been initiated and the results have been mixed In this paper the environmental effects of two applications of wireless technologies are compared to those of conventional technologies for which they can substitute First reading newspaper content on a personal digital assistant PDA is compared to the traditional way of reading a newspaper Second wireless teleconferencing is compared to business travel The results show that for both comparisons wireless technologies create lower environmental impacts Compared to reading a newspaper receiving the news on a PDA wirelessly results in the release of 32 140 times less CO2 several orders of magnitude less NOx and SOx and the use of 26 67 times less water Wireless teleconferencing results in 1 3 orders of magnitude lower CO2 NOx and SO2 emissions than business travel