Quote:
Originally Posted by yvanleterrible
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. |
For what it's worth, they don't
stay in the garbage container, at least in our area. There's usually a list of people waiting to scavenge them for firewood and other uses. And I do know some companies that make a point of reusing them. But yeah, that is a problem overall.
If the depolymerization folks get their processes working, ereaders will be easily recyclable, but I'm still not sure how much energy will be required. I think we should compare the median number of books/periodicals/documents that would be read on an ereader, including printing, transport, and recycling costs, to the production, transport, and recycling costs of the ereader to make it a fair comparison. (E.g. "you'd have to read 20 novels and a daily newspaper to come out even in terms of energy" or something like that.)
For what it's worth, I've taken to using my laptop and iLiad as "office readers." I don't print if I can possibly help it. But this is where the iLiad's slow boot and limited battery life really hurt it. If it could display pages instantly and/or stay powered up all day, plus maybe have a peer-to-peer wireless network function to pass documents to others at a meeting, it could be a paper killer. (A4/letter size wouldn't hurt, either.) The limitations built in to the iLiad still surprise me sometimes. I have a hard time guessing what use case they were thinking of to conclude that the current start time, battery life, and network functionality would please anyone.