Ask Natural Life:
Which is Greener: Pixels or Paper?
By Wendy Priesnitz
Photo © Dmitry Lobanov/Shutterstock |
Q: I see that you have gone totally digital
with your magazines, as well as publishing e-books. I wonder if you have
calculated which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an
“old-fashioned” print book or magazine?
A: To find the definitive answer to this question, one
would need to conduct a life-cycle assessment of e-readers, computers,
magazines, and books. A life-cycle assessment evaluates the ecological
impact of a product, at every stage of its existence, including the raw
materials, manufacturing process, delivery to market, its use by the owner,
and its disposal. While assessing a typical printed product is relatively
simple, it’s more difficult to undertake a life-cycle assessment of
electronic products because the manufacturers refuse to disclose what
chemicals are in them, apparently for proprietary reasons.
Nevertheless, there have been some attempts, with differing results.
In one analysis, conducted by the Cleantech Group and released in the
summer of 2009, the research and media company drew on existing studies and
found that the carbon emissions from electronic books are lower than those
from traditional book publishing. (They didn’t study magazines.)
The report compared the environmental impact of Amazon’s Kindle with that
of printed books and concluded that, on average, the carbon emitted in the
lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after the first year of use. However,
because Amazon won’t release information about its Kindle’s manufacturing
details, the study apparently referred to studies that analyzed different
but similar electronic devices, which resulted in an educated “guestimation”
of its carbon footprint.
The report states: “The roughly 168 kg of CO2 produced throughout the
Kindle’s lifecycle is a clear winner against the potential savings: 1,074 kg
of CO2 if replacing three books a month for four years; and up to 26,098 kg
of CO2 when used to the fullest capacity of the Kindle DX. Less-frequent
readers attracted by decreasing prices still can break even at 22.5 books
over the life of the device.”
Another investigation was conducted by writers Daniel Goleman and Gregory
Norris. Goleman blogged about their analysis and it was published in The New
York Times last April. They calculated the number of publications that a
person would need to read on their e-reader to break ecologically even, so
to speak: “With respect to fossil fuels, water use and mineral consumption,
the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly forty to fifty books. When
it comes to global warming, though, it’s one hundred books; with human
health consequences, it’s somewhere in between.”
Other people have produced bits and pieces of information.
The U.S. book and newspaper industries combined use about 125 million
trees a year and consume 153 billion gallons of water annually, according to
figures by the nonprofit group Green Press Initiative. On the other hand,
researchers estimate that just seventy-nine gallons of water are needed to
make each e-reader.
We also know that toxic chemicals are a problem for both print and
digital publishing. The production of ink for printing releases a number of
volatile organic compounds into the atmosphere, including hexane, toluene,
and xylene. E-readers require the mining of nonrenewable minerals, such as
columbite-tantalite and lithium. One e-reader apparently requires the
extraction of thirty-three pounds of minerals, while a book made with
recycled paper uses two-thirds of a pound. We are told that both the iPad
and the Kindle comply with Europe’s RoHS standards, which ban some of the
scarier chemicals that have been involved in electronics production. (We
don’t know about the other devices.)
The servers and computers that produce and deliver digital publications
use a great deal of energy. Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory have estimated that the average server consumes 4,505
kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, a figure that includes the power
used to cool the hardware. (The average American household uses a bit more
than 10,000 kWh of electricity annually.) A 2007 report by the Gartner Group
warned about the “carbon cost” of all the servers that comprise the
Internet: “The intense power requirements needed to run and cool data
centers now account for almost a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions
from information and communications technology.”
Also to be taken into account is the amount of energy used to power a
desktop computer, or to charge a portable device’s battery. Apple says that
its iPad uses just three watts of electricity while you’re reading, far less
than the light bulb needed to read a conventional book at night.
There are other issues, the impact of which can only be estimated. They
include the environmental, health. and social impacts of the electronic
waste created if a device is discarded each time the owner upgrades.
There are also some things that aren’t properly considered in these
comparisons. For instance, we agree with the guy whose rough analysis of the
Kindle was used in the Cleantech study that more care should be taken when
researchers are conducting lifecycle analyses of books and magazines. They
don’t seem to be factoring in the impact of the publishing industry’s
wasteful overproduction and the warehousing, transportation, and disposal of
unsold stock. And what does it do to the carbon footprint calculations when
increasing numbers of books are produced in China...or if your country has
to import its e-readers because none are manufactured there...or if you want
to subscribe to a magazine that’s published in another country?
In an article in the Washington Post in August of 2010,
environmental writer Brian Palmer suggested that we “think of an e-reader as
the cloth diaper of books.” Producing an e-reader is tougher on the
environment than printing a book, he acknowledged. But, he pointed out,
“Every time you download and read an electronic book, rather than purchasing
a new pile of paper, you’re paying back a little bit of the carbon dioxide
and water deficit from the [e-book] production process.” And since the
typical e-reader can provide access to thousands of books (that therefore
don’t need to be printed), there’s a big pay-back.
So we think that it really comes down to usage – how many people read one
book or magazine in print versus how many books or magazines one reads on an
electronic device, whether one subscribes to a print magazine or buys it on
the newsstand, whether the book is bought online or in a bookstore, whether
or not you recycle books and magazines when you’re finished reading them,
whether the digital version is read on a portable device or a desktop
computer, if the purchaser prints out the digital product, if people would
still buy computers even if there were no e-books and digital magazines, and
so on.
But even then, there are some value judgments that must be made as part
of this discussion. Some analysts say that if you want to ease the
environmental impact of reading print books, buy them online because
bricks-and-mortar bookstores are very inefficient because they stock more
books than they can sell and the remainder get shipped back to publishers or
recycled. On the other hand, local independent bookstores are important to
sustaining their local economies…. You get the picture about how
complicated this is.
So the answer to the question is that we don’t know for sure whether
print magazines and books are environmentally better or worse than digital
versions. But it appears that if you’re a power reader of electronic books, magazines,
and newspapers, and don’t trade in your gadget every year, reading
electronically could lighten your environmental impact.
We do know that digital versions of books and
magazines are cheaper for us to produce and deliver. And that means that we
can continue, even in a continuingly difficult economy, to bring you the
same quality of information that we've been publishing since 1976. And that
gets to the heart of why we are adopting digital publishing: The large
majority of our readers are here on the Internet. And, unfortunately, they
are used to accessing free or very inexpensive information here. Like every
other publishing business, we are attempting to navigate these uncharted
waters.
Responsible Digital Reading Tips
- Research your new electronic purchase to see which companies have the
best environmental and social responsibility ratings.
- Only purchase an e-book reader if you are a power reader and plan to
buy lots of books.
- Consider purchasing a multi-purpose device like a netbook or tablet,
rather than having many single-purpose pieces of technology.
- Don't upgrade your device each time a new version is created.
- Pass along your old, but still working, e-reader to someone else.
- Try not to print out your e-books, or print judiciously.
- Recycle your broken electronic devices responsibly, either through
manufacturer takeback programs or non-profit or municipal recycling programs.
Wendy Priesnitz is Natural Life Magazine's editor. She has been a
journalist for over 40 years and is the author of 13 books.
This article has been updated since it was first published in Natural Life
Magazine's November/December 2010 issue.
| 
