Newspapers Pollute Less On E-Readers and Tablets 113
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.'"
Counter-intuitive (Score:5, Insightful)
How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
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Because paper contains carbon that was extracted from the air, I guess. Not that it matters much, either way it's a negligable amount.
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But most people don't know this, so it doesn't affect the "intuitive" conclusion that most people would reach.
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Yes it does. Most trees don't live forever, after a while they die and rot away, releasing most of the carbon they have collected in their lifetime. With forestry, trees get cut down before they die, thus removing the carbon from the natural cycle. Thus, using trees for buildings or furniture is carbon-negative, but paper is a different thing. First, most paper is recycled, not made of trees, and second, they require an awful lot of processing per mass, apparently negating their good effects.
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That's only the raw material. Paper has to be refined, bleached processed. Add to that the inks and the transportation. Until recently the paper industry was one of the dirtiest businesses out there. It's not surprising that the footprint is bad if all you use it for is a throwaway news article that 90% of readers skip anyway.
Re:Counter-intuitive (Score:5, Insightful)
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My thought exactly. It's a lot less energy to push electrons than to push newspaper trucks.
Unfortunately, the energy to push the crap propaganda is infinite.
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But to manufacture a single modern chip also produces a lot of highly toxic waste that gets dumped into ocean, much more than manufacturing the delivery truck.
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Re:Counter-intuitive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Counter-intuitive !NOT (Score:2)
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 requi
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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...
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Duh... the poor don't pay a penny of it.
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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!"
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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 s
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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.
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You know, every single automobile being made today has computer chips in it. So even if this were true... it still wouldn't be.
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Don't forget all the cost of manufacturing and printing on that paper. And getting that paper in the first place. And driving people into the woods to cut down the trees to get the wood needed to make that paper. You don't even need to do any math to know that e-readers use none of the resources and a fraction of the energy.
Re:Counter-intuitive (Score:4, Insightful)
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So there is no reason, other than carelessness or the desire to "keep up with the joneses" to replace your devices annually.
Annually? Is there any evidence that this is the mean lifetime of these toys? I have an e-ink Kindle rather than a "tablet", but most of the people I know who have tablets have only replaced them because they dropped them or gave them to their kid and got the newer model for themselves.
My cell phones have always performed admirably, really only dying when I drop them repeatedly or get them damp repeatedly. Before my newest phone, I replaced the screen on my old iPhone twice before giving it up because the W
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I always tend to stretch my use of electronics. Avoiding "Windows rot" a PC will last many years for most applications. My cell phones also last many years, whilst other people keep updating theirs because their provider gave it them for "free".
But I'm appalled by how shockingly bad my iPhone 3g performs with the newest system. And because they don't have legacy versions of apps in the app store you're screwed.
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Until very recently, I had a 3g and had the same problem. However, I quickly rolled back to the 3.x series when I saw how nasty the 4.x series was. A lot of new stuff did not work, but my old apps still did - I never "lost" functionality and Cydia gave me some of the newer functions.
But yeah, I agree that the whole system is geared toward "progress", and that was a real pain for those of us who wanted to stay behind.
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Producing semiconductors is a fairly energy-intensive process, tablets are full of semiconductors -- chips, the screen, etc. I can believe, though, that if a tablet is used instead of a printed newspaper every day for 2 or so years, there is a net energy savings.
Producing paper is a far more energy intensive process, especially when you compare the volumes we are talking about here. A tablet vs. a year or two of the New York Times on paper? Not to mention the environmental cost of logging, pulp mills and physical transportation and disposal of paper and assorted byproducts...
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The burning of e-waste to extract metals, the mining of precious metals, shipping from 2nd/3rd world producing countries to consuming countries, and discarding/replacing electronics prematurely, datacenters to host, replicate, and backup the offerings, the air-conditioning. It's probably a more involved analysis than just paper versus 300kb of data.
But it's definitely nice not to have to end up with a stack of paper every week.
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How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
If I had to guess, I'd probably say with the recyclable nature of paper as opposed to the large amount of ewaste we create globally buying newer devices for the same purpose over and over, it would create the perception that creating a device to read the news off of would seem rather counter-intuitive than reading from a recyclable paper product.
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How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
Because manufacturing, powering and disposing of the devices seems intuitively like a set of processes that would consume a great deal of energy and produce a great deal of emissions as a side effect.
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Except, of course, that making paper, making ink, cutting down paper to size, printing said paper, assembling individual sheets into desired format, folding it down, loading it into vehicles, distributing to point of sale, displacing oneself to said point of sale to acquire newspaper, eventually chucking it into the recycle bin, collecting recyclable material, transporting to recycle plant, recycle it, transport it to distributor, transferring from distributor to end client, rinse, repeat, etc, consumes a S
Yes whats with the conspiracy theories? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Chopping down forests for paper decreases CO2 emissions because where most of the paper is used and made those forests are replanted. You end up with a net loss if you burn the paper, but most of it ends up in landfills eventually.
Everything else you mentioned is a CO2 producer though.
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Landfills these days decompose most of the organic materials. They repeatedly pour the water collected at the base of the landfill back over the top until it starts coming out relatively clean. This significantly extends the useful life of the landfills, and reduces the long-term costs of maintaining it. They even produce enough methane to run on-site generators and such (better for air quality and global warming than releasing it).
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This (http://comenius.susqu.edu/biol/312/mical97a.pdf) paper is a bit old, but they estimate that only 16-18% of the carbon in landfilled newsprint is released back into the air. Even if you double that, you're still sequestering most of it. If you capture the methane that's produced and burn it, you're offsetting other carbon sources. The forestry industry, including pulp and paper, actually has remarkably low fossil fuel use in production because a lot of the energy comes from burning wood scraps, whic
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We won't really be there until tablets can do everything that paper can.
If you've ever used a pressure-sensitive tablet (a good one, that is) you can really see the difference. You can't get the kind of precision that you'd like as an artist or writer.
I guess my metric would be this: when you go to your local college campus and see a majority of kids sketching local scenery with a tablet and stylus instead of a sketch pad, we're there.
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It's so counterintuitive that I would really like to check the data to see if they accounted for all the factors.
Newspapers are made from wood, which takes carbon out of the air. When you put the newspaper in a landfill, it takes hundreds of years to decay, so basically you are sequestering carbon-- a net reduction of carbon from the atmosphere.
The trees they make paper from are typically fast-growing trees planted on land dedicated for this purpose, by the way-- they don't cut down old-growth forest for p
Newspapers are carbon sinks [Re:Counter-intuitive] (Score:2)
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
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When you put the newspaper in a landfill, it takes hundreds of years to decay,
But when you incinerate it...
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What kind of paper do you use in newspaper where you live?
A lot of /. readers will be familiar with termites. These handy creatures will put your paper through the natural recycling process as soon as they can get at it. If you don't have termites, there will be plenty other bugs willing to do the job and "bugs" goes from beetles to bacteria.
When I see 3rd world waste tips on the TV, there always seems to be fires burning. I imagine this may happen on landfills nearer home. That takes very little time e
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At some point you have to move the news from where it's created to where it's read.
With the online versions, that goes over the internet.
With the physical version, that happens with fossil-fuel burning trucks. It takes a LOT of fuel to move a large quantities of a heavy product like paper.
It's not counter-intuititve at all. It's obvious.
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The amount of carbon in the paper itself is negligible (even if it is sequestered rather than incinerated) compared to the CO2 produced in the papermaking process. Growing trees to turn into newspapers which you then toss into a landfill is a really lousy way of sequestering carbon.
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The amount of carbon in the paper itself is negligible (even if it is sequestered rather than incinerated) compared to the CO2 produced in the papermaking process. .
Nice thought, but the study referenced in the original article states the opposite: that the amount of carbon spent producing the paper is much less than the mass of the paper itself.
Growing trees to turn into newspapers which you then toss into a landfill is a really lousy way of sequestering carbon.
I see no support for that statement. Sequestering is sequestering. Newspapers, corn cobs, grass clippings, old Readers Digests-- it's all the same.
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I'm with you. I'd have been absolutely shocked if there were realistic evidence pointing the other direction.
Re:Counter-intuitive (Score:5, Insightful)
This.
I realize that semiconductor manufacturing has its own set of associated evils, but seriously? Did we actually have any doubt whatsoever that somewhere on the order of 500-2500 newspapers would damage the environment less to view them electronically than by cutting down the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man, transporting them, bleaching them, drying them, transporting them again, pulping them, bleaching again, transporting them again, milling into paper, transporting them again, printing on them with hydrocarbon inks, and transporting yet one more time, a dead-tree edition of the Daily?
Okay, a single day's run, we might have a toss-up, conceptually. But over the life of the device? Seriously?
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And then, after you have read the newspaper, you toss it in the bin, which has to be emptied into a dumpster and transported yet another time to the dump, where the inks are pollutants.
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the sole significant organic CO2 sink known to man
Trees are a sink, yes, but they only absorb much CO2 while they're growing rapidly. I have 27 acres of mature forest and I've looked into the 'CO2 credit value' and it's very minimal because they're not growing very quickly.
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How is this in any way counter-intuitive?
It's hard to understand to whom this would be counter intuitive. I could see people wondering a little about the total cost of infrastructure for delivery of a paper in either method - which could hardly be said to be intuitive in either case.
But clearly the electronic version is a winner for marginal cost hands down. Imagine the energy it takes to create the paper used in the newspaper.
However (Score:4, Insightful)
They still take as many green pieces of paper to subscribe to
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You can get pretty much all popular periodicals and newspapers for free. Very helpful people online choose to redistribute them for free to anyone who wants them :)
Paying for things is so 20th century.
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Even without that factor, between direct deposit and e-payment (by cc#, bitcoin, paypal...), it's kinda tough to actually need to move greenbacks for a pay service.
No shocker if the US suddenly forces me to send my dollars to the oven for conversion to an electronic account in the next...decade or half? The "created jobs" that print the money might throw a year-long fit to delay that but they're not the boss there.
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I still prefer cash for most transactions (at least ones in person) because it's anonymous, secure, and untraceable. It's a dirty secret of government that they need those features sometimes, too. Cash won't go away as long as there are covert operations that need funding and deniability.
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Not sure what sqrt means, but Calibre has many recipes for many sites to create "issues" from their headlines. It has support for subscription based sites, many international ones, etc.
The only negative is that it doesn't keep track of what you've already downloaded, so for a less frequently updated site, it would compile in the same article it did yesterday, making it less of a "daily edition" feel to your download.
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The Financial Times costs $1, tax free. I think print is $3. The WSJ is $2 plus tax. Last I saw, it was $2.50 for print.
no shit (Score:3)
No shit sherlock.
I wonder how much power went into this study. And the carbon footprint of it.
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What if you only eat fast-food for a month? Would you produce more air pollution in that case?
That's an idea for Morgan Spurlock! SuperGas me!
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Not if you're on fire.
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I agree on this, how is this paper *not* a waste of time.
Oh, newsflash, emailing 20 page contracts pollutes less than printing them and sending a over with a messanger on a cab.
How wonderfully useless. (Score:3)
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.
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Ah, well, that teaches me to re-read before I post; at first I thought the headline was "Newspapers pollute less than e-readers and tablets".
But now the article sounds even sillier; of course it costs less to show text on my screen than to manufacture paper and ink, run them through a printing press, and deliver a physical object to my front door. Sure, electronic news requires servers, routers, and optical fibre, but physical news requires print shops, warehouses, and trucks. The former is far more effic
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So not only was it obvious when you thought they said that newspapers polluted less than e-readers, but also now that you realize they pollute more than e-readers?
It couldn't have been very obvious to begin with then could it?
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This is slashdot, self-correction won't prevent you from getting flamed and rated a troll.
But, that's ok, cause some of us appreciate it when people admit to making a mistake, even better that you caught it yourself.
Fine, except... (Score:3)
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.
Think bigger (Score:2)
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In your house do you read 3 separate newspapers, or do you wait and read the same one? Why can't you do that with a single e-reader?
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Why is this downvoted? It's 100% common sense, there's nothing wrong about this.
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With a physical newspaper I can pull out the comics section, the sports section, the lifestyle section and give them all to different people while I continue to read the front page at the same time as them. We can rotate sections later but no one has to go without reading at any given time. Do you see why I can't do that with a single e-reader?
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Because one person reads the sports section while another person reads the main news section while another person reads the review section.
Which is ever so slightly harder to do with a single e-reader.
Re:Fine, except... (Score:5, Informative)
Yes.
My family has three Kindles on the same account and all the books are shared between them. I would suppose that any type of subscription would apply to that same model as well. So, one subscription on all three devices.
The downside is they must be all on the same account, but that should be obvious.
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If you're fine with credential sharing, then yes, the New York Times allows you to access it on different devices. As for your Economist subscription, a digital subscription costs the exact same as a paper + digital subscription. If you don't need to read the paper version then going digital-only would reduce GHG emissions.
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It seems counter-intuitive... (Score:1)
Problem is... (Score:2)
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....
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Most tablets I see have some game or video on them. eInk readers are obviously always displaying text.
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"Most people I know that would read the newspaper, wouldn't buy (or use) a tablet."
Those people are generally very old and will be dead soon.
"And most people I know that have a tablet, wouldn't read the newspaper."
I read them online, but wouldn't pay for a sub. Let them make money from adverts if they like.
Counter-intuitive? (Score:1)
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
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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.
That's kind of a straw man. With a Kindle, you get to read thousands of additional books without needing to print any. If you upgrade to an iPad, you also get to play Cut the Rope. (Heh, good luck with keeping kids busy in a car by handing them a newspaper instead.)
Paper mills are incredibly polluting (Score:3)
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He's not necessarily an idiot. Maybe he's just illiterate.
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E-Reader or Tablet but not a Laptop? (Score:3)
Define Newspaper (Score:2)
RAND? (Score:3, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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The RAND corporation is huge. They're a research-based think tank. The US government is their biggest customer because they get hired to do research on public policy.
When you have a question like "I want to roll out new computers for all grade school students in California. Will this actually improve education and will it have an impact on jobs in NY in 15 years?", the RAND corporation is who you call to get an answer.
faulty analysis (Score:2)
The headline is not supported by the summary (Score:3)
Great.. (Score:1)
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'
animal rights (Score:3)
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.
Brought to you by... (Score:2)