Quote:
Originally Posted by TadW
In the article they seem to talk a lot about protection of the environment through shifting to e-paper which is complete nonsense if you ask me. A study I've seen recently seen shows that the indirect damage by using an e-book reader (battery, hardware trash, time spent online, etc.) is at least as bad for the environment as cutting trees. Before someone claims the opposite, I'd like to see proof.
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Well, green as I'd like to be, I'm inclined to think like you on this one. The worst paper offender is not the book it's the 'office report' and we're far away from a solution for them. And there is no existing office reader either.
By far the biggest wood waste overall is the 'Transport Pallet'.They account for over 40% of all
hard wood cut in North America. That is shocking. Those things are almost never reused and go straight to a garbage container. They measure from 2 to 5 cubic feet each. Compare that with a 0.14 cubic foot HP novel that will be read and reread. Paper can be recycled, I'm not shure we can reutilize much of our readers...
We can't get numbers for the imbedded energy of most electronic stuff, and toxicity involved with production?
The only thing we can say for shure is the weight ratio between a reader and the paper books over the lifetime of the reader, is enormous...
there is the savings... if the reader lasts. If you figure to replace your reader when a new one comes along, how many ebooks will you have read? 3000? 1000? 100? Some people have already totalled their readers or lost them without having read 10 ebooks.
We'll have to wait for some time before we see real figures on this. And I'm not too optimistic about the way things are going at this point. Maybe with the plastic cheaper flexible eink displays will we see some tangible difference.