How green is my Kindle?
As if you needed another reason to switch to an e-reader: now they’re better for the environment, too. According to a report by the CleanTech Group, "e-readers purchased from 2009 to 2012 could prevent 5.3 billion kg of carbon dioxide in 2012, or 9.9 billion kg during the four-year time period."
Alex Salkever goes on to say: "The publishing industry is a horrible thing for the environment. Last year the material needs of the book and newspaper businesses in the U.S. resulted in the removal of 125 million trees. Production processes for books and newspapers created 153 billion gallons of waste water, and paper accounts for more than 25 percent of all landfill volume. The upshot? Dead trees must go, no doubt."
Music to TeleRead ears, no? Of course, there is a catch: in order for e-readers to fully offset the carbon mentioned above, they have to be owned for at least a year. This is important because of how quickly e-readers are replaced with newer, flashier models.
The other day I realized that I had owned my Kindle for a little more than a year. It seemed like a very long time. I mean, isn’t it already sort of a dinosaur? There are at least two other kinds of Kindles now, to say nothing of iPhones and dozens of other devices. Isn’t it about time I got rid of this ancient artifact? Even if I don’t act on this impulse today, is it likely I’m going to still own this Kindle for four years, the time period the report cited? Probably not.
Remember the talk of personal computers bringing about the advent of that environmental nirvana, a "paperless office"? Yeah, that didn’t quite happen. And, needless to say, the production and disposal of computers bring their own myriad environmental issues. My guess is that as e-readers grow in popularity and begin to be thrown away in ever-greater numbers in favor of more advanced devices, we’ll see some of the same sort of issues surface. E-readers are built out of basically the same stuff as computers, right? (Astute readers, please feel free to correct me on this point.)
Will e-readers ever become so disposable? Owing to the slower, more permanent nature of their content, I’d say it will happen. Just slower. The first cellphone I ever saw was a battery backpack that weighed about 10 pounds and was attached to a car. At the time very few imagined that very soon everyone would be sporting such a device, and that we’d be throwing them away like yesterday’s newspaper, thus wreaking the attendant environmental havoc.
The manufacturers of e-readers could do better than their predecessors. They could design devices built to last, for one thing. Make them easy to recycle. Have trade-in programs. Explore further advances in e-Ink that do not require backlighting and thus use less power. Make e-readers a double-edged sword that slays the dragons of both wasteful p-publishing and toxic electronic gizmos. And we consumers could do our part by only buying devices that measure up. What do you say?
Spotted at the digitalist.
August 26th, 2009 at 10:57 am
The numbers are probably a lot better for PDAs, cellphones, laptops, netbooks and other multi-use devices that people do tend to keep for longer than a year (2-3 on average, if memory serves). And of course, smaller devices like PDAs and netbooks have a correspondingly smaller carbon footprint in manufacture (though they can use more energy in actual usage).
August 26th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Don’t expect I’ll ever throw mine away. Give it to someone if I upgrade, but if it’s still useful, someone will want it.
I give my computers away when I upgrade them, too.
Just because *you* might get a new one, I’m sure you can pass your old one along, thereby keeping the green going.