The study shows that Alma Media online newspapers have a lower total environmental impact than the printed. However, when considering the time people actually spend reading the printed newspaper or the electronic version, the printed version is in favour.

Further results and details of the study will be presented at the Alma Media event “Towards sustainable media” at Finlandia Hall on 25 January 2012 (9:00-11:30 ). Åsa Moberg from CESC will attend the panel discussion at the seminar.

Read more
Alma Media’s press release
Environmental performance of Alma Media products (Project page)

SEB’12 is a partnership between the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (with representatives from the Centre for Sustainable Communications and  the School of Information and Communication Technology as co-organisers) and KES International. Following the success of earlier SEB conferences, SEB’12 will feature presentations from world-class researchers, engineers and industrialists, working in a broad range of renewable energy and sustainability topics for the built environment. Applicable areas include technology for renewable energy and sustainability in the built environment; also optimisation and modeling techniques, information and communication technology usage, behaviour and practice.

For more information on conference topics, registration and submission of abstracts please visit the SEB’12 website: http://seb.sustainedenergy.org

Anna Kramers, PhD student at CESC, presents her research at KTH’s 2011 Energy Initiative, 9 November 2011.

The first Green Hackathon attracted over 30 participants to engage in developing innovations for environmental issues.

The Stockholm Green Hackathon took place 21-22 October 2011 at the former reactor hall R1 at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Eleven teams of coders created exciting prototypes, web services and mobile solutions for sustainability. The two winners were:

James Smith from England, who found an fun way of displaying carbon emissions in Minecraft.

Petri Kola and Mikko Heikkinen from Finland, who built a Chrome extension automatically ”injecting” CO2 data into websites. With their tool Remember Carbon, browsing last-minute-flights will not just be about the price but also about the climate impact.

- Green Hackathon was a great way to learn from other people about how environmental information can be used. A hack is a smart approach to get people to sharing ideas and doing things, says Bianca Sayan from Sourcemap Inc., one of the participants.

Stockholm Green Hackathon was organized by the Centre for Sustainable Communications and EIT ICT Labs.

Sustainability decisions need to rely on the results of quantitative environmental research. Commonly, these results are found in closed, often expensive databases based on proprietary software. Alternatively, environmental information is presented in text documents (pdf-files) which cannot be processed.

Example from Footprinted.org

- Environmental impact information should be accessible and easy to use. That’s why we have developed Footprinted.org, says Jorge Zapico from the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communication (CESC).

Footprinted is a web-based service applying the concept of open linked data to environmental impact information. In Footprinted, environmental research results are available free of charge. Data is stored in a format that can easily be processed to develop new services on top of the data. Everybody can create, present, share and reuse the environmental impact information. Different sources of research are presented in a transparent way. Unlike closed databases Footprinted does not apply a unique answer approach.

- It is a bazaar of environmental impact information, rather than a cathedral, explains Jorge Zapico.

In its current version, Footprinted provides a repository of life cycle assessments of different materials, products and processes. The next step in Footprinted’s development is to include the footprints of individual consumer products.

Footprinted is the result of a design research process within the project Data Driven Sustainability and is currently available in beta version at www.footprinted.org. Footprinted is a collaboration between the KTH Centre for Sustainable Communications, Sourcemap Inc and MIT Media Lab. Footprinted is to be presented on 6 October 2011 at the EnviroInfo Conference in Ispra/Italy.

Contact: Bernhard Huber, bhuber@kth.se, tel +46-8-790 64 52

IPTV streaming services (Live TV, Video on Demand) are today provided by most major media companies. Peer-to-peer networks are an alternative way of distributing movies with many providers to choose from. A project at KTH analysed the climate impact of both technologies.

- Our object of study was a two hour movie with 3 Gigabytes distributed and watched in Sweden, says Elisabeth Hochschorner, researcher at the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC).

For both systems electricity demand for end user equipment was the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The production of end user equipment turned out to be another significant impact factor. Comparing the two systems, P2P had a higher environmental impact, especially when upload speed was low.

- In P2P systems, each user is simultaneously up- and downloading which extends the total time end-consumer devices are needed. Less greenhouse gas emissions could be achieved either through higher upload speed or through decreased movie size. Using the computer for other purposes while uploading also lowers the climate impact from P2P, says Elisabeth Hochschorner.

Elisabeth Hochschorner’s conclusions are based on a life cycle assessment (LCA) presented at the 3rd NorLCA Symposium 15-16 September 2011 in Helsinki. The study is part of the larger project “Next generation media” conducted by KTH (CSC/Media) in collaboration with TeliaSonera.

Welcome to Green Hackathon 21-22 October at the KTH Reactor Hall!

The hackathon starts Friday 21 October with registration at 13.00. We expect about 30 participants.

At 14.00 Leonardo Bonanni, CEO of Sourcemap and graduate from MIT Media Lab gives a keynote speech presenting his work on increasing transparency of supply chains using open data. He argues that making visible where things come from and their impact is a keystone for sustainability.

The hacking goes on from 14.30-14.30 the next day. On Saturday 15.00-17.00 the participants will present their results and the final winners are chosen.

Stockholm Green Hackathon is organized by CESC and EIT ICT Labs.

Web Green Hackathon
Twitter @greenhackathon, #greenhackathon
Press release (in Swedish) Stockholm Green Hackathon för goda miljöidéer
Press contact Bernhard Huber, tel +46 8 790 64 52
Organizing team Jorge Zapico, Hannes Ebner

CESC’s role was to calculate the carbon footprint of the book production from cradle to gate (in this case the “bookshop”). The average book defined for the study was a paperback with 320 pages weighing 170 grams. According to CESC’s calculations this book produced an equivalent of 0.12 kg CO2eq per book, or 0.73 kg CO2eq per kilogram book. This can roughly be compared with a previous study of a hardcover book which arrived at 1.2 kg CO2eq per book.

The results of CESC’s study are presented in the report Climate Impact from the concept Climate-friendly paperbacks (written in Swedish) by Maria Enroth, Clara Borggren and Åsa Moberg.

Many companies have clear guidelines to ensure that the number of business trips will decrease in favour of travel-free video meetings. A research group at KTH has looked closely at the factors that determine how meetings take place and under what circumstances they are substituted by video-mediated communication.

The researchers have collaborated with four major media companies in Sweden in an attempt to identify motivational factors and barriers to video meetings (including videoconferencing, telepresence and video-call solutions).

“We quickly found that video meetings is replacing business trips primarily to save time and money,” says Minna Räsänen, one of the researchers at the Centre for Sustainable Communications (CESC) at KTH. The environment is less important when companies choose between a business trip or a video meeting, even though many guidelines highlight the environment as one of the main arguments.

Other, less tangible factors that determine the choice are often individual. This may include the employee’s fear of problems with technology or uncomfortable situations when cameras, headsets and other equipment have to be handled.

A well-thought-out choice of meeting room is also important.

“It may be a mistake to place the video meeting equipment in the most popular meeting room. This means that video meetings compete with regular physical meetings for room space,” says Minna Räsänen.

It is efficient, both economically and environmentally, if video meeting equipment is located in rooms that are available and bookable for many employees. This increases the chance that video meetings increase in number and that the purchase of equipment will be profitable, and that more trips are replaced in practice.

For more information, contact Bernhard Huber, communications manager at CESC: tel +46-8-790 64 52 or bhuber@kth.se.

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The article Meeting at a distance: Experiences of media companies in Sweden (doi:10.1016/j.techsoc.2010.10.002) has recently been published in the journal Technology och Society and is a result of CESC’s research project Newspaper companies and ICT from an environmental perspective. The project was conducted during 2009 and 2010 in cooperation with Bonnier, Stampen and the Swedish Media Publishers Association (TU).

CESCs research on travel-free meetings is continued in the ongoing project Drivers and barriers for mediated meetings.