How Green Is My Kindle?

I recently saw print books referred to as "dead tree books". Clearly the person was making the point that every book made of paper uses wood pulp, while an ebook theoretically uses none. Even though I am a monumental fan of my Kindle ebook reader, I had to respond that dead or not, those trees could be replaced. They are a renewable resource. The plastic used to make a Kindle or similar device is primarily a petroleum product, and petroleum is not renewable. When we use it all up, it will be gone. That got me thinking about the complex issue of what natural resources go into the creation of print and ebooks. It's not an easy thing to put together, least of all if you, like me, have little in the way of science education, but I will do my best.

This is meant as an objective analysis. As I say, I have my own reasons to love a Kindle.. it reads aloud to me, which I need. As soon as paper books start reading themselves aloud to me, I'll be back. In the meantime, I am just curious about the claim of environmental impact one way or the other.

Print books use lot more than just trees. Petroleum is a big component of their manufacture and transportation just like plastic products. Besides the petroleum used in cover art and manufacture and inks, the plants that produce the books use petroleum products. More than any other aspect of the publishing industry, transportation of books from the printing plant to distribution centers to stores uses vast amounts of petroleum.

How does this compare to, say, a Kindle 3 ereader? My Kindle weighs 8.5 ounces by far most of which is plastic. One source I found said that a plastic bottle is made from the amount of petroleum that would fill it a third of the way. The bottle itself, and in this case I am talking about a 16 ounce bottle in terms of volume it holds, uses about 13 grams of plastic. So that adds up to 13 grams of plastic being made out of a little over 5 ounces of petroleum. That's just less than 142 grams of petroleum. So if I understand this correctly, it takes ten times as much petroleum to make plastic.

So the Kindle sitting on my desk required at least 80 ounces of petroleum. It probably takes much more. Then there is the manufacture, the transportation, and the energy used to make it but also to power it. It is a low user of electricity so we can probably skip that per unit in the calculations.

Where the carbon footprint gets really tiny in terms of print book to Kindle ereader is in the area of the books themselves. Ebooks are not made of anything other than energy and a minuscule of that to boot. A Kindle can hold dozens and dozens of books. So it would be unfair to do a comparison of 1 print book to 1 ereader. You would have to compare literally hundreds of books, magazines and newspapers, not to mention documents, to a single publication made of paper.

Another aspect of print books versus ebooks is the fact that physical books must be shipped. Ebooks do not.

So, bearing in mind my calculations boil down to more of a conceptual equation than a technically accurate one, the 80 ounces of petroleum used in my Kindle is to be compared with hundreds of books, only one of which (like the Kindle) of which ever makes it out of the door of the printing plant.

Now, like I said, since I have to read with my ears, there is no comparison for me of print and ebook. Print books are wonderful.. I have hundreds of them. But they may as well not be there, since I cannot make use of a single one. No, not even picture books. But that rather colossal issue aside, I think the carbon footprint of an ebook is worth having more than one book to read.

Now.. calm down... I know there are libraries and all that. This was an intellectual exercise, and if anyone can offer more exact data, I hope you will share it. My own bottom line is choice. And that we all have.

The issues I raise above are far from the only issues of importance.  As Jim just pointed out, ebooks require a vast infrastructure even to exist.  But it's not cut and dried.  And it may ultimately be comparing apples and oranges.

So what do you think?