Which is Greener: Paper or Digital? The Answer May Surprise You

[Prometheus Bound]

Interview with Don Carli Executive Vice President of SustainCommWorld LLC, and Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for Sustainable Communication.

“Other than pushing the ‘cool’ factor, one of the main selling points being made by marketers of eReaders is that they are greener than print. It is little surprise that the common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory is that going digital means going green and saving trees. Many are in for a rude awakening. When subjected to ‘cradle-to-cradle’ life cycle analysis, eReading is not nearly as green as many naively assume it is.”

“There is no question that print media could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders, and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable.”

“Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver, and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently, there was little, if any, voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle ‘backstory’ of digital media.”

“Sadly, print has come to be seen as a wasteful, inefficient and environmentally destructive medium, despite the fact that much of print media is based on comparatively benign and renewable materials. In addition, print has incredible potential to be a far more sustainable medium than it is today… and a truly digital medium as well. Despite its importance to business, government and society, print has been cast in the role of a dark old devil in decline. Digital media has been cast as the bright young savior on the rise.”

“Ironically the future of digital media and eBook readers is likely to be based on flexible polymer electronics manufactured using printing presses rather than silicon semiconductor fabrication technologies. In fact, the next generation of eReaders will most likely be digital AND be printed.”
http://blog.metaprinter.com/2009/03/news-media-innovation-convergence-and-sustainability-interview-with-don-carli/

[sendero]

1. Long on speculation..

... short on facts.

Without quantifying these costs, listing elements is useless. How much gold is in an eReader? Infinitesimally little.

How much energy do these things use? Not much, a lot less than a light bulb. You can read these in the dark, you can't read print in the dark.

Full disclosure: I don't own an iPad, Kindle or any other ereader. Nor do I have any desire to, but it has nothing to do with "green".

[Statistical]

13. Can't read a kindle in dark.

It uses eink. It is literrally digital paper.

There is no LCD, no backlight and as a result it uses virtually no power. The screen only draws power when it changes pages.

People think kindle is some kind of laptop for books but you really need to see one in person to realize how revolutionary eink is. No glare, no blinding backlight, no eyestrain, no massive energy consumption. It is digital paper.

The kindle battery is only 6 watts hours (3.7V * 1530mAh) and good for about 2 weeks. So Annual power use would be about 150 watts (with wireless off) or about $0.01.

Now turning on wireless uses more power (about triple) but if you want to be green just turn wireless on buy a book it downloads in about a minute, turn off wireless.

[MyNameGoesHere]

22. Can't plug a USB lamp into a book either

but i sure can plug it into my Kindle and read in the dark.

[Statistical]

23. True.

I am not faulting the kindle. Just a lot of people seem to think the kindle is a laptop for books. The reality is it is something entirely new.

As a developer I stare at a pair of backlit LCD all day long.
Last thing I want to do when I get some is squint at a backlit LCD screen trying to read a book.

If the Kindle was backlit I wouldn't be interested. It would just be a power hungry laptop in a different shape.

[dkf]

2. Except once you buy the reader then you've already done the resource use.

And what if you bought it for convenience first and then books incidentally?

Looks like the gist of the article is never ever buy computer.

[Prometheus Bound]

3. But the technology and features are changing so quickly.

Many people who can afford the first one will want the much better one a year or two later. Like mobile phones, netbooks, and so on.

I think the gist was that e-readers are not as green as people think and maybe books are not as environmentally unsustainable as they are sometimes made out to be.

[dkf]

5. Well I buy all my equipment to read things other than books.

If I read a book on it it was just an extra

My boss prints everything from his computer for him to read. Now that is wasteful.

[frazzled]

4. Some other issues to take into account

Technological platforms are ever-changing. This is why we have to buy new computers, cell phones, and other gadgets every five or six years at most ... because they simply become technologically outdated and unable to support the newer applications and uses. That hunk o' junk then has to find its way back into the system somehow. Hopefully, most of their parts are recyclable. But we know most people just throw them in the trash.

This will inevitably happen to the e-readers, and then that Kindle and all the e-books you bought to read on it will be as useless as that old Betamax videocassette machine you bought in 1976. A paper book, properly conserved, can last hundreds of years. (Maybe there will be a way to save your electronic books, in the way we transferred old Super-8mm films first to video and then to DVD ... but each generation of these technologies themselves becomes less and less stable: be prepared to have to transfer your DVDs to something else in the not-too-distant future).

We are building in more and more obsolesence into our products and platforms. And that is clearly not very green.

[WeDidIt]

6. I find it odd

that a luddite is blogging.

Plus, the energy consumption of eReaders is amongst the lowest of any technology. On charge on a Kindle will last two weeks.

[phasma ex machina]

19. +1 Instead of trying to misdirect guilt M$M fishwrap ought to stop trashing my planet each day.

[Brickbat]

7. I have to say "green" does not come into consideration when I want to read.

It just doesn't.

[liberal N proud]

8. Didn't take into account all the wood required to build shelves

to store the books once you have read them.


:rofl:

[Prometheus Bound]

9. E-waste

[phasma ex machina]

26. Fishwrap waste

Front End:


Back End:

[surrealAmerican]

10. What does the author mean by "spiraling requirement for energy"?

Computers, especially portables, have been reducing their energy requirements for years. It helps improve battery life.

[Statistical]

14. And the kindle uses far less than any laptop on the planet.

The battery in kindle is literally 6 watt-hours.
Most laptop batteries are 80-120 watt-hours in capacity.
So despite lasting 2 weeks the battery is tiny.

A kindle in a year uses roughly the same amount of power that a light-bulb uses in an hour.

[MadHound]

11. Nice point that needs to be examined even further

We're now creating a huge electronics waste stream. The average person gets a new cell phone every sixteen months, a new computer every three years. Part of this is due to shoddy computer construction, part of this is people are continually sucked in by new bright shiny objects. There is also the fact that designed obsolescence is pushed hard by both hardware and software manufacturers, the better to make more money.

The same market dynamic applies to digital readers, already first generation Kindles are turning up in the electronics waste stream as people go on to the next bright shiny object.

We're just going to be adding to an already huge waste problem. Electronics get tossed into the landfill where they leach their heavy metals out into the groundwater, and plastic, well it never dies.

Books on the other hand can be fully recycled, paper is biodegradable, and wood is a renewable resource.

Yeah, yeah, I know, what a hypocrite I am, typing this message on a computer. Sadly, the computer has become one of those "necessary luxuries" of the modern world, much like telephones used to be. However my computer is seven years old, I don't have a Kindle and my cell is a basic model that is six years old.

What needs to be done is invest more in making our electronics greener, more recyclable and to slow down this drive by hardware and software firms towards built in obsolescence. Instead of having a computer becoming a dinosaur after five years, make it for the long haul, a decade or more. What a concept.

[Statistical]

12. Lots of speculation and reality has a lot of variables.

The reader is front loading all the waste and most of energy consumption.

Thus if you buy a kindle, get 4 or 5 books and then break it after a year and dump it in trash = much worse than paper.

On the other hand if you are a huge reader = 100+ books a year. Buy a kindle, buy 2000 digital books, keep it for 20 years = likely better than paper.

The variables would be the length of time the reader is kept, and number of titles purchased.


KINDLE CREATION COST IN RESOURCES + (BOOK READING ENERGY COST) * (# of books) vs (# of books) * (resource cost per book)

BTW: the Kindle (with wireless off) is very efficient in terms of power. One could even buy a small solar panel to keep it charged that way and eliminate energy cost from coal.

[DCBob]

15. If all digital information was still on paper there would not be a single tree left on the planet..

There are issues but digital is the only way forward.

[MadHound]

16. Got anything to back that assertion up?

After all, we currently have the entire output of history, thousands of years, on paper, and gee, we still have lots of trees around.

Oh, and trees are renewable, unlike all those heavy metals currently leaching into the ground from discarded computers, phones and other electronic paraphernalia.

[DCBob]

18. Just an intelligent hunch considering the massive amounts of data stored in digital format now...

I am a software engineer and database administrator.

[Statistical]

20. Here is likely right.

Maybe there would be some trees left but it would be massive massive deforestation.

http://www.infoniac.com/hi-tech/amount-digital-information-reached-281-exabytes.html

Total worlds digital information is 281 EXABYTES - thats 281 billion Gigabytes.

Single page of unformatted text (72 char per line x 52 lines per page) is about 10KB.

So roughly 1 MB of text is 1000 pages.

281 billion gigabytes = 281 trillion megabytes = 281,000 trillion pieces of paper.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_sheets_of_paper_are_made_from_a_tree

At 9,000 (i'll use 10,000 to make math easier) pages per tree:
that is 28 trillion trees.

[pipi_k]

17. Green, not green, I don't care....

I prefer real books because reading isn't just about reading.

For me, it's a sense-fest

The feel of the book, the texture of the pages, the smell of the paper, the sound the book makes when you thump it on the side, etc.

That's also the reason I never really took to "books on tape" either.

[Libertas1776]

27. +1

[earth mom]

21. Why aren't people using their local libraries instead of buying books? Sharing is greener than

owning a huge personal library or a kindle which both hurt the environment in their own way.

I love books and I read constantly but I only buy books for my kid plus books for my husband and I to use as reference-gardening, decorating, art, crafts, travel etc.

Everything else we all read comes from the library and I feel good that we're not killing a bunch of trees or hurting the environment because we're willing to SHARE with others.

The last thing we would ever want is a kindle.


I have been looking into audio books recently and there are several ways you can go about getting them besides the library:

Itunes- purchase audio books for the ipod

Rent audio books for a fee- http://www.simplyaudiobooks.com/

Rent audio books for a monthly fee- http://www.audible.com/

Get FREE audio books from the public domain- http://librivox.org/

[pipi_k]

24. Started doing that a few years ago, but...

the town where I live is so small there's only one library, and because of budget cuts, it's only open one day a week now (as opposed to three before) and the selection of books is rather limited.

I get most of my books secondhand...eBay or the Goodwill store in the Big City. When I'm through I donate them back to the Goodwill. Actually, one neat thing I've seen is at the Sports/Rehab center where Mr P has been getting PT...there's a small area just inside the door where people can take or leave a book.

I've also left books around in random areas through the BookCrossing.com site.

http://www.bookcrossing.com/


Lots of fun! :)

[earth mom]

25. Used books are great too. Love the idea of Book Crossing, though I haven't used it

because we have a really great library in this area and I rarely have books to give away.

I'm glad that you posted the info about Book Crossing because it is a great resource. :hi: