Environmental Impact

You see and hear the buzz words everywhere-carbon footprint, environmentally friendly and green. We're encouraged to buy, use and dispose with the environment in mind. While it's easy to recognize the negative impact of excess packaging and chemical content in many of the products we purchase, it's not so easy when it comes to reading material. When we think of print books it's easy to envision the pulp and paper industry chewing up trees and spitting out toxic waste. When we look at a digital reader, or a computer, it's not so easy to see what goes into the manufacturing of the product. Here are some things to keep in mind as we make our choice.

eBooks are created electronically. No trees are cut to produce them. No ink is used to put the words on the page. No fossil fuel is used to run presses or power trucks to move them around the country. No storage facilities are heated to store boxes of books until they are shipped to bookstores.

eBooks are delivered to the end user electronically. They are read electronically. They are disposed of with a push of a delete button, without ever taking up room in a landfill.

Consider This:

It takes twelve trees to produce a ton of printing paper. Twenty-four trees for higher grade writing paper.
A mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as ten people inhale in a year.
Only 5% of the paper used in the book industry is recycled.
Up to 35% of books printed for consumers are never read. They are returned to the publisher and end up in landfills.
71% of the world's paper supply comes from natural forests, rather than tree farms.

The above is an excerpt from an article written by Rita Y. Toews for Read an eBook Week. Read the full version at: http://www.ebookweek.com/ebook_environment.html

Want to learn more about the environmental impact of eBooks v. printed books? Greg Kozak dedicated his master's thesis to the subject, completing a comprehensive life-cycle assessment for the two formats. You can read the full results of Greg's study here: http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS03-04.pdf