Interview
Would You Like THAT BOOK in Paper or Plastic? In terms of environmental friendliness, e-book readers stack up well against paper books.
save paper, but can a piece of plastic really be better for the environment? ES&T reporter Erika Engelhaupt is determined—very determined—to find out. ERIK A ENGELHAUPT
I
generally feel pretty good about my green street cred. I try to buy organic food, and I neatly sidestepped the paper-or-plastic dilemma in the checkout line by buying a couple of cloth bags and patting myself on the back. Then, I bought an electronic book (e-book) reader. I love the gadget—it’s the size of a slim paperback and holds more than 200 books, magazines, and newspapers. I can even read blogs on it. When I showed off my e-reader around the office, I kept saying, “Just think how many trees I’ll save!” I felt very eco-hip and started smirking at the poor saps reading the dead-tree edition of the Washington Post on the subway.
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That worked fine until a bright co-worker pointed out that my fancy new piece of plastic might one day lie atop a pile of electronic junk in an Asian recycling facility, the kind where children pick through toxic components by hand. And so the question remained—which is better, paper or plastic? I began to fret, just like any environment reporter worth the paper she writes on. How do I value trees versus landfills? What about the electricity I’m using, no doubt generated in a coal-fired power plant? Uh-oh. Books seem like a small part of a typical American’s environmental footprint—Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, said earlier this year that he isn’t interested in making an e-book reader because “people don’t read anymore.” But Americans buy more than 3 billion books a year, grinding up 20 million trees, and the book industry is growing, not shrinking. Plus, I want guidelines to help me wade through other environmental choices. Marketing geniuses have caught on to Earth Day (now stretched into Earth Week), and companies are clamoring to “go green”. How can I evaluate their claims? So I jumped right into the scientific literature, and what I found led me on a paper chase through the publishing industry and into the world of life-cycle analysts who have thought very, very hard about all the ways that one purchasing decision can mess up the world.
Are bookworms green? First, I study up on paper. I learn from eco-entrepreneur Raz Godelink about the 20 million trees cut down annually for the U.S. book trade. He is the very © 2008 American Chemical Society
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Electronic book readers
enthusiastic CEO of Eco-Libris, a small company that plants trees in developing countries to offset the ones sacrificed for books, at the price of a dollar per tree. Only about 5% of the paper used in books today is recycled, he says, compared with 38% of the paper used in all industries. And of all trees harvested for industrial uses, about 40% are used for paper. Strike one against the tree-carcass edition. As for my e-book reader, Godelink is not quick to predict the demise of print. “E-books will become one of the solutions to green up the industry, but there are a lot of steps to take,” he says. Winning over consumers is a big one. “Maybe in 50 years, more people will use them regularly, but right now they don’t suit many people.” You do have to give up that new-book smell. I calculate that if I buy 20 e-books a year, plus get my two newspapers as e-book subscriptions, I’ll save at least 700 pounds (lb) of paper in newspapers and another 20–40 lb in books. Using an online calculator, I figure that’s almost one tree saved per year, which is not bad. According to the Worldwatch Institute, the average American uses 1500 lb of paper annually. And globally, 71% of the world’s paper supply comes from natural forests, which support diverse wildlife, rather than from tree farms (according to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development’s 1996 report Towards a Sustainable Paper Cycle). Reducing paper use does more than save trees. Pulp and paper mills are also a major source of pollution. They release into the air CO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx ), sulfur oxides (SOx ), carbon monoxide, and particulates, which contribute to global warming, smog, acid rain, and respiratory problems. In addition, bleaching paper with chlorine can produce dioxin, which is known to cause cancer. Paper mills also produce large amounts of solid waste and require a lot of water. The industry is trying to clean up, but anyone who’s driven past a paper mill has smelled the challenge.
Get a life (cycle assessment) So how can I compare e-book readers and paper across all their environmental impacts? For that, I need serious analysis, so I look to the gold standard in explaining environmental impacts: a life-cycle assessment, or LCA. An LCA is sometimes called a cradle-to-grave analysis because it adds up all of the environmental impacts of a product or service from its manufacture to its disposal, including the use of energy, water, and natural resources. It’s a great way to compare two products. E-books are so new that few scientific studies have been done, but I hit the jackpot when I find Greg Kozak. Kozak, as it turns out, was on the cutting edge 4 years ago when he conducted an LCA comparing e-readers with paper college textbooks for his master’s degree thesis. He works now as an
environmental consultant at First Environment in Chicago, where he helps companies calculate their greenhouse gas emissions. First, Kozak outlined all of the potential impacts of the e-book reader and the paper book for each phase of their life cycles, starting with their manufacture from raw materials and continuing through their distribution to consumers, use, and disposal. For each stage he calculated the materials used, total energy consumed, air and water emissions, and total solid wastes on the basis of published values or, occasionally, his own lab measurements. He counted a lot of things that most of us might not think of, like ink production and plastic packaging. In Kozak’s analysis, e-textbooks won out overall for environmental friendliness. “It’s not just saving trees,” he tells me. “There’s a lot you should look at in terms of the natural resources needed to produce a book, but there’s also the physical storage of those books, shipping books, and consumers driving to the bookstore,” he says. “With an e-reader, you eliminate those.”
The paper industry is trying to clean up, but anyone who’s driven past a paper mill has smelled the challenge. He found that over its life cycle, a paper textbook created 4 times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader and several times more ozone-depleting substances and chemicals associated with acid rain. Conventional books also required more than 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books. For e-book readers, most of the energy consumed is from the electricity used while reading. “Although [it was] the most significant contributor to the e-reader’s LCA results, electricity generation for e-reader use had less of an environmental impact than did paper production for the conventional book system,” Kozak writes. The paper book’s biggest green advantage is that no electricity is needed to read it. My e-book reader is a Kindle made by Amazon.com, and like several of the newer readers, it uses an electronic ink display instead of an LCD, or liquid crystal display. Not only is electronic ink easier on the eyes than a backlit display but it’s also more energy efficient because there is no need to produce light. Because Kozak’s analysis used an LCD e-book reader, the results of his energy use calculations are higher than they would be for a Kindle. He found that despite their higher energy use during reading, e-readers used June 15, 2008 / Environmental Science & Technology ■ 4243
less total energy than print books during their entire life cycle: 742 megajoules compared with 3794 megajoules.
Newspaper’s big footprint
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The New York Times alone has more than 1 million weekday print subscribers, and each subscription uses 520 lb of paper per year. A single subscription for a California reader generates about 1500 lb of CO2 from production to disposal (about half is recycled), according to a study in ES&T (2004, 11, 2961–2970). That’s almost as much CO2 as is produced by driving 2000 miles in a car that gets 25 miles per gallon.
able Communications at Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology. Moberg’s team deemed reading the newspaper on an e-book reader to be environmentally preferable to reading it in print. But reading a web-based newspaper can use even more energy than print. Reading online on a desktop computer for 10 minutes produces the same load on the environment as reading an e-book for half an hour, and reading online for 30 minutes has the same overall effect as reading a print newspaper. Moberg reminded me to think about my energy source as well; if I get my electricity from a comparatively “dirty” source like coal, my environmental footprint will be larger than if I had a cleaner energy source. She also offered me some common-sense advice on my own reading footprint. “For every year you keep your device and don’t buy a new color or upgrade, you’ll have a lower environmental impact per use. So the message is not to buy new things all the time.” Point taken. And using my e-book reader to read more kinds of material, like newspapers and magazines, also minimizes my environmental harm.
Toxic reading
Should you read all about it in print or electronically?
The study’s authors, Arpad Horvath and Michael Toffel of the University of California Berkeley, compared levels of pollutants and water used in producing the print edition of the Times to levels used in producing the electronic version read on a personal digital assistant, or PDA, such as the Palm Pilot. “Compared to reading a newspaper, receiving the news on a PDA wirelessly results in the release of 32–140 times less CO2, several orders of magnitude less NOx and SOx [which cause smog and acid rain], and the use of 26–67 times less water,” they wrote. Researcher Åsa Moberg in Sweden studied the environmental effects of producing print versus electronic newspapers by using an e-reader (the iRex Iliad) similar to mine, but she also considered the impacts of reading newspapers on the Internet. The results were published in a 2007 report called Screening Environmental Life-Cycle Assessment of Printed, Web-Based, and Tablet E-paper Newspaper by the newly launched Centre of Excellence for Sustain4244 ■ Environmental Science & Technology / June 15, 2008
One of my biggest questions about e-book readers— namely, what toxic materials could they release to the environment?—was the hardest to answer. “For toxicology, that’s where LCA techniques are more limited in their capabilities,” says Kozak’s former research adviser Gregory Keoleian, co-director of the University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems. “If you really want to model health effects, you need to understand the emissions, fate, and transport of materials and human exposure through different routes like ingestion. You need a more sophisticated risk assessment,” Keoleian says. For the most part, Kozak had to rely on adding up the total weight of waste produced, and even doing that can be tough. “I tried to contact manufacturers to find out what [e-book reader components] were made of, to get the weight and percentages of the materials,” Kozak says, “and it was really difficult to get that information.” He ended up taking apart an e-book reader and asking scientists in other departments for help in identifying some of the parts. The e-book reader generated less total solid waste during its life cycle (77 kilograms [kg]) than printed books (94 kg) in Kozak’s case study, which compared 40 textbooks in each format. Moberg’s study went further to quantify toxic impacts and found that using an e-book reader to read newspapers had lower human toxicity impacts than reading a print newspaper. Reading a web-based newspaper for 30 minutes or more created the most potential toxic harm to humans and marine ecosystems, followed by the printed newspaper. For freshwater and terrestrial ecosystems, print newspapers had the most toxic impact. I’m not willing to pull apart my own Kindle to see what materials are inside, but I did find a blogger who
seemed eager to disembowel his own. In fact, on the blog Reversing Everything, blogger “igorsk” has photographed and labeled all the Kindle guts. Too bad I’m not an engineer; I’m not sure how to gauge what metals or materials might be in an SDRAM card. So I call Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network, an environmental advocacy group focused on global trade in toxic waste, and ask her what kinds of materials the group worries about in e-waste.
A printed newspaper creates up to 140 times more CO2 than an electronic version. There’s no simple way to tell what’s inside my own e-book reader, but many circuit boards contain lead solder and use clips made of copper and beryllium, Westervelt tells me. And electronics in general can contain cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and flame retardants that have been linked to health problems. In the EU, a new directive took effect in July 2006 called the Restriction of Hazardous Substances, which limits the use of these materials and will require manufacturers to recycle, at no cost to consumers, all electronics sold
in the EU. The U.S. has no such law. Amazon.com has a free recycling program for the Kindle that sends the devices to a licensed recycling facility. A company spokesperson declined to give me any additional details about the program or the materials used to make the e-book reader.
Not so easy being green Our world has become such a complicated place that every purchasing decision can become a Ph.D. dissertation topic, as I quickly learned. Ultimately, I think our purchasing choices are also ethical ones; we decide whether inhaling the smell of a book is worth losing a tree and whether having a smaller carbon footprint is worth the risk of adding toxic waste to a far-flung land. No purchase is without consequence, although I’m feeling pretty good about having done my homework on this purchase, even if it was after the fact. I can’t do a full life-cycle assessment for every gizmo I buy, but I can take my purchases seriously and ask that manufacturers do, too—whether they make paper or plastic. Erika Engelhaupt is an associate editor of ES&T.
Disclaimer Views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of the American Chemical Society.
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