My hope is to sell this article for, like money (as opposed to other forms of currency used for barter or trade) since it’s fungible. Plus, I’ve not yet asked for permission to use the pictures. Note: The ^[x] is a hyperlinked footnote for fact-checking purposes and won’t be in the final version. Your feedback is appreciated.

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The environmental considerations of buying an e-book reader

Books have been in their current form, ink on paper, since Johannes Gutenberg’s press in the fifteenth century. If I tell you I’m reading a book, you know it’s made of paper. Until recently, electronic books were confined to a niche market for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) and computers. Both PDAs and computers use flickering screens, which irritated the eyes. Computers have limited transportability—desktop units don’t leave the office and notebook computers have a short battery life.

Enter devices using “electronic paper” or e-paper: enter the e-book reader.

These handy electronic devices use electronic paper which can be read in full sunlight. Known because they use known as electrophoretic displays, known as electronic paper, energy moves pixels into place on the screen. Once in place images do not need refreshing, giving the device low energy needs as with a television picture.

Imagine a bookstore and library resting in the palm of your hand. Amazon’s e-book reader is perhaps the best known. Amazon describes its product, the Kindle, as a lightweight “wireless reading device” that allows you to “find, buy, and read” text instantly. It holds up to two hundred books, and even more when it’s equipped with a memory card.

So, sShould you buy an e-book reader (which will be referred to as an e-reader from here on) or stick with paper-based three dimensional random-access devices—books magazines, and newspapers (or as one wag put it three-dimensional random-access devices)? This article discusses some environmental considerations in your weighing the options. Neither choice is free of consequences because: everything comes from somewhere, everything must go somewhere., and there’s no such thing as a free lunch. The points to consider are:

• The four “R’s” – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, and finally Rubbish.

• Toxicology 101

• Our carbon footprints – CO2 and yuckier stuff.

• Conclusion – Which book is the “clearcut” winner?

The Four “R’s” –Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, or Rubbish

Rubbish or Hello Landfill, My Old Friend

Though in the hierarchy of options, the landfill must be the option of last resort, we need to talk about it first to put all into perspective. After all, Americans toss 245 million metric tons of waste each year, an amount triple what it was 40 years ago ^[x].

Electronic books ought to shine here, since as Bob Sacks, president and publisher of Precision Media Group puts it, “bits and bytes don’t fill up landfills^[x].”

Digitally speaking, he’s right. Californians alone, discard 1.2 million tons of newspapers and magazines, that adds up to 3% of what’s thrown away annually ^[x].

Physically speaking, he’s not wholly correct. Bit and bytes cannot fill up landfills, but unwanted, out-dated technology can. The national numbers stagger the imagination. On average, Americans discard more than one computer and three cellular phones every second. (source – Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist and authority on waste management at the Natural Resources Defense Council. )

There are 120 million new pounds of electronic waste (e-waste) each year just in California. And since not all of that is recycled, 440 thousand tons of junked electronic goods end up as 1% of its waste stream each year^[x].

“It’s a problematic percentage,” said Jeff Huntz; he’s charged with E-Waste Management & Recycling for California’s Integrated Waste Management Board. More about that later.

Score the point to paper.

Reducing or Cutting Down on Cutting Down (Trees)

Kevin Pereira of cable TV’s G4 network, called the Amazon Kindle, “the savior to many, many forests in the future”^[x].

We Americans like wood so much and find it so useful, we consume three times as much the rest of the world. We like using wood for construction, paper products, furniture, patio decking, fuel, film, plastic tape, rayon fabric, and a variety of other products. Americans like wood so much, we use the equivalent of a Connecticut-sized forest filled with trees 100 feet tall and 20 inches in diameter, every year^[x]. And we value trees and forests so much, the wood we use often comes from outside of America’s borders^[x].

Newspapers, books, magazines, and writing paper account for about one-quarter of that theoretical forest.

Kevin Pereira is recognized as an expert on trends in video games and technology, not economic theory.

Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos has become successful on recognizing what people want to buy. After all, Amazon.com is one of the few dotcoms to make money and survive the Internet business bubble. Since Kindle debuted, Amazon is selling more books. Bezos told attendees at BookExpo America, an annual bookseller’s tradeshow, “After purchasing Kindle, customers continue to purchase the same number of physical books that they bought before buying their Kindle, but altogether…their [Kindle plus physical] book purchases on Amazon increased by a factor of 2.6.”^[x]

The first six months of a product startup may not tell the whole story, but the data intimates something similar to the result of the mythical paperless office: companies found they used more paper and ink as a result of high speed printers and computers, not less. There have been some indications this is changing with a generation used to computers and reading from screens. Still, more generally, technology’s use tends to increase the consumption of paper.

Score this one a draw.

Reusing – There’s Gold in Them Used Books

People reuse books. Do electronics have the same staying power?

There are diehards who are still running MIT’s Altair 8800, Commodore’s Amiga 1000, Apple’s Macintosh 128, or Tandy’s TRS-80. After twenty years, many still love the Apple Newton, one of the first personal digital assistants (PDA). These are exceptions.

The reason we aren’t still using the Altair 8800 is an observation Gordon E. Moore of Intel made in 1965. It has been so self-fulfilling it became known as “Moore’s Law.” Moore’s Law fuels the electronics revolution: “The number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years.” The result is more power, faster and cheaper. And we want it.

And in some ways, we need it. Programmers write software that takes advantage of the more powerful chips. Older machines cannot handle the memory-hungry programs so they are phased out. At some point, users must upgrade.

“[T]he first law of the digital age: newer is better,” said Scott Pelley on CBS’s Sixty Minutes. “In with the next thing, and out with the old TV, phone or computer.”^[x]

Greenpeace lists the average lifespan of a computer as three years, mobile phones, two^[x].

Books are passed around, resold, donated. Computers offer more of a challenge. The US EPA maintains a website listing places to donate or recycle old computer and other electronic products. A cursory perusal yielded no donation places for my old machine, only recycling.^[x] There’s always eBay and Craig’s List.

Score the point to paper.

Recycling or “In A Previous Life I Was A Book About Shirley MacLaine”

Recycling saves energy. Recycling paper, to make paper of the same or lower quality than it was originally, can reduce energy consumption up to 40%. The energy savings is as much as 70% for plastics^[x].

Recycling saves raw materials. Depending on the age of the equipment, one ton of scrap from discarded PCs can contain more gold than can be produced from 16 tons of ore^[x]. “If you can use recycled materials, you don’t have to mine ores, cut trees and drill for oil as much,” says Jeffrey Morris of Sound Resource Management, a consulting firm based in Olympia, Washington^[x].

We have made significant increases in recycling in the past 50 years. Taken per capita, half of what we toss now gets recycled. The down side is we throw away nearly twice as much (by weight) than we did 50 years ago. The average person still produces 2½ pounds daily that ends up in the landfill. The result is an increase in trash since our population has nearly doubled during that time^[x].

How is electronic waste recycled?

In the case of Japan’s Panasonic Company, they manually disassemble electronic waste by separating out the various elements, cleaning, crushing the glass and sealing the remains. Not everyone takes as much care as Panasonic.^[x]

Much of our recyclable material goes to developing nations, primarily China and India. There, poor migrants dismantle and recycle anything from plastic to electronic waste. Often, the methods employed (usually illegal) pose health and safety risks for workers, others, and a serious threat for the environment^{[x] [x] [x]}.

In Guiyu, China and other backwaters like it, people burn the plastics over fires in the open, pulling out chips and pouring off the lead solder. Men use a medieval acid recipe to extract the gold inside ^[x].

One method soaks CPUs, pins, and edge connectors in a nitric solution for a week, which separates the gold from the other metals. The ‘recycler’ then adds aqua regia (a yellow fuming corrosive mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid), which dissolves the gold. Silver can be precipitated out with common table salt to silver chloride.^[x]

The Future of recycling electronics

Recycling will improve over the years as manufacturers learn to create products designed for recycling or mulching. The Sustainable Packaging Coalition, a non-profit working group that has already developed guidelines emphasizing the use of renewable, recycled and non-toxic source materials.^[x]

Score the point to paper.

Toxicology 101

Toxic Leftovers

Thousands of chemicals are used in the production of electronics, so E-wastes contain a witches’ brew of heavy metals and organic compounds that have been linked to cancer, brain damage, and birth defects. These include arsenic, chromium, and cadmium mercury, lead, lithium, nickel, chromium, copper, cobalt, lead, mercury, molybdenum, polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), vanadium, yttrium, and zinc. All of these can (and in many communities have) end up in the water we drink or the air we breathe^[x].

By some accounts, discarded electronics account for 70 percent of the overall toxic waste currently found in landfills ^[x].

Paper recycling involves chemical surfactants, and hydrogen peroxide, hydrosulfites, chlorine dioxide, or oxygen used in the bleaching process. These chemicals are nothing to be trifled with. Still, compared with e-waste…

Score the point to paper.

The toxicity of ink – Yo Soy Hombre

Compared with the lethal alphabet from Arsenic to Zinc, petroleum-based inks seem to be a small worry. Petroleum-based inks contain VOCs, volatile organic compounds that evaporate and react to sunlight.

Manufacturers make soy ink by blending soybean oil with pigments, resins, and waxes. Though it’s not 100% biodegradable or edible, soybean ink needs less energy to manufacture and has fewer VOCs ^[x].

In the U.S., 30% of newspapers already print using soy ink for their black-type print, and 90% of all newspapers use soy ink for their color runs ^[x].

From the user’s viewpoint, though soy ink has a lower rub off than petroleum-based ink ^[x], e-ink won’t rub off.

Score the point to the ereader.

Your Other Carbon Footprint – Cyanide

Electronic stuff doesn’t grow on trees, or on anything else.

“If it’s not grown, it has to be mined,” says resource geologist Sarah Andrews, author of the Em Hansen mysteries. “Welcome to my world.”

It’s a world filled with explosives, Bunyanesque front-end loaders moving unfathomable amounts of dirt, toxic organic chemicals and heavy metals. Obtaining the raw materials needed for the manufacture of technological devices has an environmental cost.

“These are not your grandfather’s mines,” says Robert Moran. Moran has a PhD in hydrogeology. His company, Michael-Moran Associates, has commented extensively on the environmental impacts of mining projects around the world. He recognizes both sides of the controversy.

Moran describes present-day mining like this: “most are open-pit mines that are constructed on a huge scale unheard of less than thirty years ago.”

The best known is the Kennecott Copper Mine. At 2 ½-miles across, and ¾-mile deep, it is the world’s largest man-made excavation and can be seen from outer space.

Moran goes on to explain that for every ounce of gold, a gold mine displaces and crushes at least thirty tons of material. Then, most employ the ‘CL process’—cyanide leaching. The miners splash cyanide over the ‘headings’ (tailing are the leftovers) to separate the gold and other metals from the headings. The cyanide percolates through the ore and drains into pits.^[x]

“Pits at some sites,” Moran says, “are over two thousand feet deep, and one to two miles across.” Gold produced through strip-mining—and most is produced that way—generates nearly eighty tons of toxic waste for each ounce of refined gold. “Everything in the periodic table will be in the waste tailings.”

After the ore is mined out, the pits and the cyanide products remain like nuclear waste: around for a long time and no one really knows what to do with it.

Hard-rock mining produces more toxic waste than any other industry in the US, though that number is better than it used to be. The EPA holds the US mining industry to higher environmental standards than most mines will be in other places in the world.

The manufacturers of e-readers consider its architecture to be proprietary and they’re too new to have been recycled in any numbers, so we don’t know their makeup. Let’s assume that each e-reader needs about one-thousandth of an ounce of gold, because that is roughly the amount of gold used in a single mobile phone. This amount generates over one hundred pounds of toxic waste—just for the gold. And while gold may be the sexiest metal in the mix, it is far from the only one.

So, because all of our electronics use plastics and a host of metals in their construction, each one leaves behind significant toxic baggage.^[x] And, every year, billions of electronics are produced. Instead of saving trees for our descendants, we’re leaving tons of toxic wastes and landscapes where trees may not grow for millennia.

When we gather the raw materials for paper, we cut down trees. Trees do grow back.

Point goes to paper.

Conclusion or Which one is the clearcut winner?

Conventional wisdom holds to the idea that technology saves trees and energy. This contains at least two fallacies: that the crowd is correct and the problem is a straightforward one-to-one substitution. Mark Twain wrote, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” Or to put it as curmudgeon H. L. Mencken put it, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

Using less paper and wood means using less technology, because as we’ve seen with Amazon’s book sales and the paperless office, technology’s use tends to raise consumption of paper, rather than lower it.

If we’re going to use something, perhaps using trees isn’t such a bad thing. Trees replenish cutover areas.

Paper-based books come from something renewable and electronics hail from a non-renewable source. Forests grow back; metal and oil doesn’t. Name one part of your computer, personal digital assistant, mobile phone, or e-reader that is grown. One part, any part, that qualifies as natural and renewable. I’ll wait.

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Trees use carbon to manufacture cellulose. After making something from that wood such as furniture, building material, or paper, the carbon stays locked in the product. Plastic or metal manufacturing uses nonrenewable sources while releasing more carbon. Non-renewables consume more energy in their extraction, transportation, site reclamation, and production, than their renewable counterparts.

In the interests of full disclosure, this is where I have to admit to being a forester. I have seen the before-and-after of tree cutting, and I have watched forests over decades. I support conserving trees. I also support harvesting trees responsibly. We need to grow more trees. And then we need to use the wood we grow as a substitute for metal and plastics wherever possible.

Given our current mining and recycling technologies, a clearcut that will be filled in with saplings after less than a decade looks like the better alternative when compared to gouges in the earth filled indefinitely with everything in the periodic table.

So, except for the color of the money to buy them, electronics just may not be all that green, due to what economists call “externalities” and the “tragedy of the commons^[x].” These are what the rest of us non-economists might call “making a mess and not cleaning it up.”

Winner: Dead-tree books, they have fewer externalities, at least for now.

Do the landfill and toxic waste issues surrounding electronics mean we should not buy new technology? This is not a Manichean choice; it’s not either or. The answer lies not in returning to Neolithic times, but in considering the effects of the decision to buy beforehand.

I’m a forester, I’m not a Luddite.

That’s it. That’s my article. Your feedback is appreciated.