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Newspapers Pollute Less On E-Readers and Tablets
bobwyman writes "It seems counter-intuitive but a RAND full lifecycle analysis (PDF) shows that reading news electronically produces fewer GHG emissions than reading news on paper: 'Adopting e-readers could reduce GHG emissions from publishing and distributing newspapers by 74 percent; using tablet computers could result in a 63 percent reduction, assuming that all the GHG emissions associated with producing and operating e-readers or tablet computers are ascribed to reading newspapers. If a more realistic assumption is adopted, that the emissions associated with these devices should be spread across other activities pursued on these devices, the difference would be on the order of 84 to 89 percent less, respectively.'"
How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
May the Maths Be with you!
They still take as many green pieces of paper to subscribe to
No shit sherlock.
I wonder how much power went into this study. And the carbon footprint of it.
assuming that all the GHG emissions associated with producing and operating e-readers or tablet computers are ascribed to reading newspapers
Also, my PC makes a very inefficient desk lamp, assuming I only use my PC as a desk lamp.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
It sounds OK, except that in our house a newspaper is typically read by at least 3 people. Would they allow three e-readers to access a single subscription? Would they do that for the same price as a single e-reader? At present, it sounds unlikely for most of them. Needing multiple subscriptions and multiple e-readers would seem to involve an economic hit and reduce any GHG benefit.
The exception that I'm aware of is The Economist magazine, which allows a number of devices to download its issues on a single set of credentials (we use apps on two Android phones and full web access for two or three computers). Of course, that access is provided as a side benefit to having the paid dead-tree subscription, so it probably does not reduce any GHG emissions.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
... if you're retarded. Does the poster have any idea how much carbon footprint is involved in the paper milling process? It's obvious that e-readers save on that alone, not to mention ink, delivery, oil and energy for the pressing machines, etc. What an idiot.
Most people I know that would read the newspaper, wouldn't buy (or use) a tablet.
And most people I know that have a tablet, wouldn't read the newspaper.
Quite the paradox....
Why would it seem counter-intuitive? You need to buy a new newspaper every day but you only buy an e-reader once, if you know how to take care of your gadgets.
If you go with a Kindle, you need to account for all the manufacturing and recycling of all components, along with transport of it all. However, you only need to count all those steps once.
If you go with newspaper, you also need to count all the energy and chemicals required to print and distribute newspapers every day. The paper can be recycled, but that requires more energy for transportation back to the recycling plant and more energy and chemicals to recycle and re-manufacture more paper.
The real question is, how long does a Kindle 4 need to last before it has the same "footprint" (from manufacturing to recycling) as daily newspapers? You'd need to set a size of newspaper (dimensions of the pages, number of pages, type of paper, type of inks, etc). It's a really complex question.
Just think of the forests that are chopped down, pulp mills powered by coal to process the pulp, the millions of liters of water used to process the pulp, millions of liters of chemicals to bleach the paper, and finally the tens of thousands of trucks and even ships used to transport the paper to the printers....then of course the printers are on industrial scale all in themselves. A world of tablets, which should become smaller, more powerful, more environmentally friendly over time, could save many forests.
Forestry industry around the world employs millions of people around the world, and associated infrastructure, tablets and a connected world will virtually eliminate this entire industry. The greatest contribution to release of carbon in the world today is due to slash and burn techniques in deforestation. The articles numbers are accurate. Everyone should do their part and adopt to the digital age that is the 21st century.
If you've ever been near one you'll know it. They smell horrendously and are one of the biggest polluters in the world. And as far as literacy goes, world wide it dropped by half between 1970 and 2005, and reading in the US, at least for novels, has rebounded in recent years.
My computer is on all day anyway, so I use it to read the news. Now this guy is telling me I have to use a tablet or e-reader to save the Earth? Sounds like someone got paid for that "analysis".
What is this? Is it new?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I can't help but feel there is a bias.
RAND Corporation (Research ANd Development[2]) is a nonprofit global policy think tank first formed to offer research and analysis to the United States armed forces by Douglas Aircraft Company. It is currently financed by the U.S. government and private endowment,[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAND
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
newspaper readership has already declined dramatically due to internet and broadcast sources. the environmental footprint from desktops, laptops, pda, phones, tablets is fearsome but these devices are used for other purposes also
The headline is not supported by the summary let alone by the article. The headline says "Newspapers pollute less on E-readers and Tablets". Yet the summary says nothing about how much pollution is generated to produce a paper newspaper vs reading it on an electronic device. The article and the summary only talk about the relative green house gases of these two distribution methods. Perhaps people have forgotten that there is a lot of very serious pollution out there. Pollution that is actual poison. Even if you consider green house gases pollution, there are many types of pollution that are much worse. This article does not examine those pollutants in any way, so does not really address the issue described by the headline.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Just what we needed, bring in the 'greeines' into this.. I used to love my e-ink.
Get them involved and it will be ruined, or at least make me want to toss it into the street and 'pollute'
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I'm sure that when use by animals is taken into account, crapping on newspaper vs. e-reader, the paper is more economical. You don't find e-readers hanging on a nail in a remote out-house/dunny/thunder-box.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
...the Department of the Bleedin' Obvious.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Newspaper...
1) Send guys with chainsaws to forests, either via helicopters or real off-road vehicles, not your wimpy consumer SUV
2) Cut down trees with gas-powered chainsaws (producing pollution already).
3) Drag logs to logging road, and haul them via truck to pulp+paper mill
4) Convert logs to pulp and then paper; rather energy intensive
5) Haul paper from mill to printing plant.
6) Run the printing press, using some "interesting" inks
7) Haul the printed newspapers via truck to customers
Just some of the required infrastructure...
* log-hauling trucks and newspaper delivery vans
* chainsaws
* fuel
* pulp+paper mills which consume huge amounts of energy
* printing plants
* ink manufacturing
If we had started with electronic newspapers, and someone invented "deadtree newspapers" today, they would not succeed.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
Nice thought, except when you actually read the article, there is no support for that statement.
The referenced study did not count the carbon sequestered as a negative contribution to the atmospheric carbon.
They list the weight of an average newspaper at 0,2 kg, and they list the atmospheric carbon emitted in producing it as 0.254 kg per thousand kilograms of newspaper (table 3.1, page 11), which comes to 0.025% of the weight of the newspaper. If even a tenth of percent of the mass of the newspaper ends up as sequestered in landfills, it sequesters four times the carbon emitted in producing it, and then print newspapers are atmospheric carbon sinks, not carbon sources.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Get rid of the IRS and the income tax, and save 300,000 trees / year by not printing a bunch of tax forms. Its called the Fair Tax, and you don't have to file a D thing...
AKA the FuckThePoor Tax.
I hate grammar Nazi's.
Those plants stink worse than almost any other industrial process. On bad days it feels like the fumes are sucking the air out of your lungs.
Duh... the poor don't pay a penny of it.
Think of all the jobs that would eliminate.
Most of the IRS staff would no longer be needed : enforcing a simpler tax would require far fewer people, and could be a mostly automated process.
Most tax accountants and tax attorneys would no longer be needed.
All those lobbyists who lobby to keep a loophole alive would no longer be needed.
All those banks who create elaborate tax shelters for rich people no longer need to offer those services, since with a simpler tax code, most shelters would no longer work.
And so on. This could be a million jobs or more.
Worse, the superrich who have spent years creating elaborate shelters would be facing HUGE tax increases, since the shelters they spent all that time and money building would be defunct. THIS is why the idea of the fair tax is a non-starter.
US taxes aren't complicated because of paper; they're complicated because the whores in Congress keep writing new loopholes for their business partners and rich constituents to exploit.
The only fair part of that "Fair Tax" is the title. Leave it to Americans to listen to some rich guy saying "You know what would be a great idea? If I paid the same taxes on my Hummer and 10-room mansion that you pay for bread!"
My first reaction was exactly what everyone else is saying: how is that not intuitive? Then I thought for a while about who would think this was intuitive.
My initial reaction is to jump on conservatives, but that is not fair. Sure, conservatives tend to go after anything "green" or "environmental", perhaps beyond reason, and might assume claims that paper production uses a lot of energy are more liberal conspiracies. Unfortunately, they have good historical reasons to be very skeptical of ignorant positions on the "green" side, so it's mostly not political. We can come up with this kind of thing on every side.
Really, I think it's deeper. It's simply a lack of quantitative thinking by most people. Here, there are a lot of engineers and scientists, and we're trained not to make assumptions until we run the numbers. We're also well equipped to guess at the size of the industrial machine behind making physical newspapers, and the size of the machine behind ereaders. Most people aren't.
We're also trained to understand how big a difference in scale there is between infrequently purchased equipment (ereader, capex) and a frequently purchased supply (paper, opex). Finally, we understand orders of magnitude. Most people don't, even, in some cases, relatively intelligent people.
I would say education would help, but most educated people have these kind of blind spots, too. It does point to the need for everyone to have some reasonable science education, at least enough to think critically and quickly come up to speed on the basics of important issues. (This particular issue probably isn't the most important, but it's similar to important voting issues.)
Define your acronyms. I don't appreciate having to look up GHG to figure out what it is.