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More sustainable: E-readers or books?
A Kindle eBook reader
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STEVE CHIOTAKIS: Prices of e-reader devices such as the Kindle and the Nook have been dropping fast. That's making the technology accessible to more users. And as the e-reader market heats up, we asked our sustainability reporter Adriene Hill to find out which is better for the environment: regular books or electronic readers?
ADRIENE HILL: Let's have an environmental boxing match. In this corner: weighing in at 8.5 ounces -- the e-reader. The environmental downsides: e-waste, electricity use, mining products.
And in the other corner: the old school favorite, books. There we've got to worry about paper, trees, water and chemicals.
REFEREE: Touch Gloves, go to your corner and come out fighting.
It's not an easy fight to call -- it depends on how many books you read and where you get them. Emma Ritch, an analyst with the CleanTech Group, says the e-reader comes out on top.
EMMA RITCH: Most people aren't going to the library, they're not borrowing books, they're not recycling them when they're done with them.
But James McQuivey of Forrester Research says people don't think that way -- the fight just doesn't matter.
JAMES MCQUIVEY: People love to say that the care about the environment. But when people make purchases, they generally make purchases based on things that are easier for them to measure.
Like cost and convenience. Jeanna Garcia is a good case in point. She sits in a park reading on her Kindle. It's a toasty day in early September in downtown Los Angeles.
JEANNA GARCIA: It never occurred to me that this was an environmentally-friendly thing to do. It just never crossed my mind.
She didn't like the mess books made in her bedroom. McQuivey from Forrester thinks there's another reason that e-reader sellers won't be touting their environmental friendliness.
MCQUIVEY: The problem with that message is that it's one that Amazon and Barnes and Noble don't want to send. Because they want to continue to sell you physical books because they know you're going to want some.
McQuviey does think we'll get to the point where e-readers and tablet devices like the iPad are more environmentally-friendly and use less energy than they do now. Why?
Because none of us wants to have to remember to keep charging the things.
I'm Adriene Hill for Marketplace.
STEVE CHIOTAKIS: If you want to check out more on the environmental
rumble between e-readers and paper books,
head over to Adriene's blog "Easy Answers".
Comparing an e-reader to a conventional book is meaningless. I'm an avid book reader who tries first to get books from the library. But I use the e-reader for articles and papers that I down load from the internet and then to the e-reader. I could read them on a computer but the e-reader is more comfortable and more convenient. If I printed the articles out I'd use a ton of tree. If I read them on a desktop computer I'd use a pile of energy and I'd burn my eyes out.
I wonder if anyone has considered the possible hazards to the eyes and body/brain of holding and looking at an electonic device for long periods of reading time. I'm not familiar if these give off an electromagnetic field. Just wondering.
As a librarian who has seen a sharp increase in borrowing of books in the past two years, as well as a sharp upturn in use of our Internet computers by older adults, I would say libraries are quite busy. Isn't it the best way to recycle books, you read it and then the next person does?
E-books and digital content don't grow on trees. Their creation, distribution and use require massive quantities of energy, minerals, metals, petrochemicals and labor.
Digital media has a long way to go before making claims about having a smaller environmental footprint.
Proponents of digital media often tout the environmental benefits of the digital media shift in terms of the number of trees that will be saved, but shifting to digital media has an environmental footprint and toxic impacts that bear greater scrutiny. All to often they present their case based on cherry-picked data, anecdotal evidence and unfilled promises.
Rather than relying on questionable proprietary estimates of lifecycle impacts we need reliable independently verified standards-based lifecycle inventories of the energy and material flows that makes broadband access to digital media possible.
See:
Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment Than Print?
