Optimism or pessimism: Environmental impacts of the e-commerce

Based on the prior researches, models and the re-understanding of e-commerce, the paper proposed a conceptual model - a two-layer construction, to discuss the environmental implications of e-commerce. Through respectively analyzing the primary effects caused by infrastructures, secondary effects lead by applications and tertiary effects coming from behavioral changes in intranet and extranet of e-commerce companies, the paper finally categorizes the environmental implications into energy, resources and pollution aspects. Generally, there are positive as well as negative environmental influences of e-commerce.