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Originally Posted by acidzebra
You seem so sure more efficient recycling systems will solve the matter, or that they can even exist for that matter. Recycling costs energy. Recycling of current-day and near-future electronic products will NEVER be energy efficient.
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You have to balance that against the costs not only of manufacturing products from new resources, but the effort expended in (usually) digging up those new resources in the first place. So it is entirely possible (and, I think, very likely in most cases) for the process of recycling existing materials to expend less energy than digging up and using new materials.
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Originally Posted by acidzebra
That said, if it _is_ possible to recycle efficiently, paper may well turn out to be more readily recyclable than complex electronics.
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As the article points out:
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Only about 5% of the paper used in books today is recycled, he says, compared with 38% of the paper used in all industries. And of all trees harvested for industrial uses, about 40% are used for paper.
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So yes, paper, too, can be recycled much more efficiently than it is today. (Note: Paper recycling usually involves the same chemical- and water-heavy processes that create so many of the pollutants common to new paper production.) But that doesn't change the economy of scale that electronic readers have over paper, which the article tends to back up.