Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
This discussion (so long as it remains a discussion) is a perfect example of how little experience society has in figuring in total net costs to any item. In this case, total net costs can extend to materials harvesting/mining, factory production, transportation costs, energy usage, environmental maintenance, storage maintenance, pollution cleanup, recycling and mitigation... most of which has never been seriously figured into the costs of a single item before, but is generally left to business losses to record and taxes to clean up after.
As society comes to understand how much more strictly we will have to manage our resources in the future, these total net costs will become more prominent and better understood, and at some point, we should have the capacity to provide a dollar figure to the total cost of a single book. The field is (unfortunately) still young, and reliable figures are probably beyond any source. But for the moment, discussing the various factors should help everyone to understand just what-all is involved, and to what extent.
Translation: I love it when a good discussion comes together!
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I totally agree here!
My main point so far has not been, that I'm convinced that paper is more environment friendly than eBooks. The point was, it isn't as obvious what is the greener tech as some want or believe it to be. And its pretty understandable why they aren't marketed as such. Since if you do, someone will come with a study how paper is more efficient. Then you need come up with a counter study, than someone has to make again a counter-counter-study and so on.
If we imagine the perfect market of the feature, every product might have environmental impact as one if not the greatest production factor. Think about the history of economics. At first economy worried about 3 major factors: capital, work and ground. Somewhere on the way ground was removed, since we seem to had enough and economy moving from agrar to industry, ground was not a factor worthy to worry about much. Now capital steadily increasing, as well as having an oversupply of work (thus the unemployed getting a problem in almost all industry nations)... the major future production factor might become environmental impact.
If we somehow magically manage to include all the external and environmental effects into the price of every product, we could trust on the market from itself to show us the greener tech. Then if something is cheaper its greener... Today you can almost guess it most times to be the other way around. The cheaper the more you can assume it took child labour, redicolous large transportation ways and so on.