Are ebooks really more environmentally friendly?

I’d like to think that I’m an environmentally conscious person. I recycle. I don’t litter. I try to use canvas bags at the store instead of plastic (it’s hard to remember to take those canvas bags with me though). And I hope to one day own a ‘hybrid’ car that has almost zero emissions. I’m also a vegetarian, which has to count for something.

There also seems to be a general consensus that ebooks are better for the environment than their print counterparts. I have believed this for a while, and it is one small reason why I have turned into an ebook evangelist. But then I started thinking: Are ebooks really more environmentally friendly? Or am I just believing all the hype? I decided to do some research to find out for myself.

Before diving into ebooks, it might be good to first look at print books to get a bit of a perspective. Since print still dominates the literary world, it will be a good yardstick by which to measure how ‘green’ ebooks are.

First, there’s an excellent post over at Teleread about a similar topic Apple & Amazon rated at bottom of climate change scorecard that discusses this issue. This post makes a great point about print books, which I’ll expand on after the quote:

The current book ordering system encourages bookstores to order more books than they can reasonably sell. That increases the number of published copies and consequently the number of returns (and the amount of shipping costs).

The big chain bookstores (i.e. Barnes & Noble and Borders) order large quantities of books for their stores. Of course, not every book will sell. So the books that sit on the shelves for too long usually get returned after a set amount of time (anywhere from one to three months). So you not only have all the resources that go into producing the book, like paper, printing, packaging and shipping. If the book doesn’t sell, it has to be shipped back to the publisher. I don’t know what happens after that. There appears to be a lot of waste in traditional print publishing.

Newspapers are also guilty in the excessive waste department. I find it amazing the large numbers of print newspapers that don’t sell at my local bookstore. And of course, once the day is over, the paper is already out of date. Even if the papers do get recycled, it’s still a lot of resources being wasted.

The verdict on ebooks…

While looking for information about ebooks and the environment, I found that the overall feeling is that, yes, ebooks are much more environmentally friendly than print books. Here’s an excerpt from an article, Umbra on e-books, that appears to sum the feeling up nicely:

A MS candidate named Greg Kozak pitted textbooks against e-book devices [PDF] in 2003. He found that paper production, electricity of printing operations, and personal transportation were the main factors affecting the book footprint, while electricity was the main issue for e-readers; and that books were responsible for four times the greenhouse emissions as e-readers.

And then there’s this article Ebooks and Environmental Impact over at the Self-Publishing Review:

On Salon, there’s a highly technical summary of the amount of energy it takes to read on a computer vs. printing out an article to read it. The verdict: “The contrast is quite convincing, one-tenth of a pound of greenhouse gas emissions from reading the document on the computer, versus almost one-quarter of a pound of greenhouse gas emissions for printing it out!”

Or, put it another way, using the Kindle as an example:

Another article lays out the environmental impact of reading a newspaper on a reader and reading the New York Times on an ebook. Their conclusion: “Reading the physical version of the NY Times for a year uses 7,300 MJ of energy and emits 700 kg of co2. Reading it on a Kindle uses 100 MJ of energy and emits 10 kg of co2.”

I’d say that ebooks are very much more friendly to our earth than print books. Are ebooks perfect? No. There are still problems with energy consumption, raw materials used to make the ebook reading devices, properly disposing of old devices and so forth. But I believe that as technology improves, the ‘footprint’ that ebooks leave on the environment will become smaller and smaller. For example, using solar power to recharge your reading device’s batteries.

Do you think ebooks are better for the environment? Give your reasons in the comment section below. I look forward to reading your answers!

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