P-books: Earth-menacing polluters—compared to e-books?
“What with production and transport, the average paperback has eaten its way through 4.5kWh of energy by the time it gets to a reader. In terms of climate impact, this is equivalent to about 3kg of carbon dioxide emissions for every glossy new textbook. So, for a print run of 10,000, there is a cost of 30 tonnes of carbon dioxide not mentioned on the dust jackets.” - Times Higher Education Supplement article as quoted in the Charkblog (spotted via Peter Brantley).
The TeleRead take: So will the environmental movement ever latch on to the potential of e-books? Oh, the horrors! To think that literacy could help give us a Day After Tomorrow scenario of climatic disruption—with not just global warming possible but also the opposite problem? Actually, even many environmentally friendly scientists might challenge the possibility of a DAT-style blizzard, but global warming is pretty much an accepted threat despite the excuses from the dummies in the White House.
Meanwhile I’d love to know more about the p-book side. Trees grown for the paper industry eat up carbon dioxide, you know.
October 14th, 2006 at 6:57 pm
I’d also like to see how what proportion of the paper stream goes into making books vs. other products. We have a lot of books, but I’d guess that we’ve gone through many, many times more volume of “disposable” paper of various kinds– mail, flyers, office use, packaging, newspapers, diapers, tissues, etc,– and it’s not as if we try to use more than we need to. Unless there are some hard numbers that say otherwise, my intuition is that books are a relatively minor part of the papaer stream, and have a much higher benefit-to-cost ratio than many other things one might be environmentally concerned about.
(One possible thing many of us can address: If your computer system draws 150 watts when idle– which it can if you run a compute-intensive screen saver or other idle processs, and keep a bunch of peripherals on– leaving it on all day consumes 3.6 kWH, almost as much as what’s claimed above for a book. Being smart about power-saver modes, and turning off anything that uses more than a small amount of idle power when you don’t need it, can potentially save a fair bit of CO2 over time.)
October 14th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Ask a power engineer: off-peak power demand is rising across the board. This is pretty much all attributable to devices that never actually turn off. You hit the power button and the thing goes into “standby” mode–which is still consuming power. All these things in standby–your TV, computers, TV decoders, TiVos, etc.–can easily eat up to half of your home’s daily power consumption.
October 14th, 2006 at 10:35 pm
Many thanks for your thoughtful analysis, John. Here’s my reply. Aren’t you very likely going to be leaving on your system for other purposes besides reading—anyway? And increasingly, aren’t people likely to be running LCDs rather than CRTs? I’d also note that as e-book-friendly tablets get better, more and more people will be reading from them.
As for the percentage of solid waste for which books are responsible, I doubt it’s that high. But it may add up.
Meanwhile, separately, a polite reader writes with a link to a story arguing against the global warming theory. He says: “Earth science is complex. And most eco-demagoguery excludes the roles, naturally arising phenomena like sunspots, methane-plumes and gravitational field flux play in regular eco-cycles. Don’t be an ass, David. Be informed before you outgas, adding info-pollution to a ‘tough’ subject.”
Of course, this contradicts the conclusions that leading scientific groups have reached. I’d welcome further thoughts from readers regardless of their views.
Thanks,
David
P.S. Cerebus, I appreciated your reply as well (somewhat in the vein of John’s).
October 14th, 2006 at 10:42 pm
Of interest to John Mark Ockerbloom and Cerebus: news that Google is pushing for lower power consumption in computers. - David
October 15th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
A more interesting figure would be kWh per reading experience, not per book. A copy that’s read by 2 people has a better cost-benefit ratio than a copy that’s read by 1.
Thinking about it, the average readers-per-book ratio might actually be lower than 1, given that unsold books are returned from retailers to be pulped/recycled (I understand that a typical returns figure is 40%). A significant chunk of that 4.5kWh would, I suspect, go on trucking and pulping.
When comparing with ebooks, we should consider the impact of making, shipping, powering and disposing of the reader devices. Batteries in particular, with their limited life, are a concern. The very pace of technological change is of concern too, because there’s always the temptation to toss an obsolete device into landfill.
kWh per book is also relevant to print-on-demand. If the day ever comes when highstreet bookshops have a POD machine in the basement that can manufacture books according to local demand, many of the environmental costs of shipping and pulping will be avoided.
October 15th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
I wasn’t so much trying to compare the relative energy consumption of p-books vs.ebooks so much as suggest that either way, the energy cost is probably down in the noise compared to other things that consume natural resources. In other words, reading books has high intellectual and cultural benefit, and relatively low cost in terms of natural resources, so it’s not worth worrying a whole lot about, relatively speaking. (And you can lower it further on the print side by making judicous use of libraries and used books, increasing the readership of each book produced.)
That’s why my point of comparison was the *idle* power consumption of computer systems, not the active consumption. Idle consumption provides a much lower benefit (since you’re not actually using the system when it’s idle) for comparable cost. So for those of us who use computers and worry about energy consumption, it’s worth paying attention to first, especially if a few simple steps, like better idle practices and settings (or as the Google article linked above suggests, better power adapters) make a significant difference.
But if someone wants to challenge this or other conventional wisdom, I just need to see some reliable and relevant numbers. Those are often scarcer than they should be. The linked article about the Keppler study, for instance, didn’t call into question the role of CO2 from human activity in global warming; rather, it claimed that trees were not as much of an offset at some thought, due to larger than expected outputs of methane from trees. (And the authors of the Keppler study quickly went on the record to say their findings were misinterpreted in the popular press; see http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2006/pressRelease200601131/
for a press release from them.)
March 13th, 2008 at 11:04 am
John, re the first question you posed: Even cursory research (the kind I did) shows that the paper used for book production can’t be more than about one-half of one percent of all paper usage–the worldwide total for books is about 2/3 of one percent of paper usage for just the U.S. and Europe.
As you say in another way, books represent a very high-value use for relatively small amounts of paper.