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How Green Is My Media?
May 12, 2008

Last week, I looked at various “green” issues and how it is possible to incorporate environmentally responsible and sustainable practices into your marketing efforts. As a coda to this discussion, I will attempt to evaluate the respective “greenness” of print vs. non-print media.

It is not uncommon for “print” to be referred to as “dead trees.” And yet, is print really that environmentally irresponsible?

Think about this, for example: Which has a greater ecological impact—print newspapers or electronic newspapers? The conventional wisdom has it that print newspapers result in fallen trees and discarded papers clogging up landfills. But then the fact that I’m asking this question suggests that I have a counterintuitive answer in mind. Or does it?

A brace of studies released several years ago by the Institute for Future Studies and Technology Assessment (IZT) of Berlin, Germany, have yielded some surprising conclusions about the ecological impact of print vs. electronic media. In a nutshell, electronic newspapers have a much greater environmental impact than conventional print newspapers, at least when it comes to the business models that companies have been using—that is, e-newspapers as downloads for PCs, laptops, or via UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Services) for mobile devices. IZT researchers point out that the real environmental impact of “electronic paper” is largely due to the energy required to make customized newspaper content available via UMTS mobile communications, ubiquitously and 24/7. At the same time, the researchers found that the environmental impact of the hardware required (that is, mobile devices) is much less than with conventional PCs or laptops, but the energy consumption that individual data transmission requires for the energy-hungry UMTS network more than compensates for the energy savings from end devices.

While I confess that I have not read the full studies (they’re in German, with no English translation available that I’ve been able to find), what seems clear is that “ecological impact” is not as straightforward an issue as we might initially think. Yes, electronic media reduce paper consumption and landfill use (at least in theory), but use more energy.

While the German studies have concentrated on newspapers, the conclusions can be extrapolated to print and electronic media in general, since the same issues are involved, namely: one medium uses paper that ultimately ends up in landfills, while the other uses energy.

Paper (that is, trees) is a renewable resource, while the fossil fuels used to generate the energy that keeps the Internet’s many many servers going are not. And while much talk focuses on commercial printers reducing their carbon footprints, data centers may be poised to pass airlines in pollution, at least according to a study by McKinsey & Co. and the Uptime Institute. Says Information Week:

Greenhouse gas emissions from data centers will more than quadruple by 2020, passing the total emissions of airlines, predict[s the] new report.

Still, that does not necessarily have to be a foregone conclusion. The article continues:

much of the increase will be due to poor management. IT, business, and facilities management functions are doing too little in terms of demand and capacity planning, the report says. Top execs aren’t holding CIOs accountable for capital and operational expenditures in the data center because they don’t have the data they need to do things differently. CIOs should create “energy czar” positions to manage efficiency, the report says, recommending the use of a new metric called Corporate Average Data Efficiency that combines IT and facilities costs to track energy use.

It bears mentioning that the printing industry has been subject to strict environmental regulations governing voltaile emissions and chemical effluvia for decades.

At the same time, environmental experts warn of a looming e-waste epidemic. Says one of two reports on the topic published in Scientific American last November:

Two years ago, the U.S. generated an astonishing 2.6 million tons of electronic waste, which is 1.4% of the country’s total waste stream. Only 12.6% of this so-called “e-waste” was recycled. Worse, e-waste is growing faster than any other type of trash the EPA regulates, including medical and industrial waste. Unwanted cell phones, televisions, PCs (including desktops, laptops, portables and computer monitors), computer peripherals (including printers, scanners and fax machines), computer mouses and keyboards amounted to more than 1.9 million tons of solid municipal waste in the U.S.; of that, more than 1.5 million tons were dumped primarily into landfills, whereas the rest was recycled, the EPA says.

...The EPA estimates that roughly 283 million PCs will be sold in 2008, up from 255 million this year. And these new computers are pushing the old models out the door at a rapid pace: U.S. residential and business users scrap about 133,000 PCs daily. Cell phones are also quickly becoming part of the waste stream. More than one billion mobile phones shipped worldwide in 2006, according to Framingham, Mass.–based technology research firm IDC—22.5 percent more than the 832.8 million units shipped a year earlier. By 2008, the United Nations Environment Programme (the U.N.'s environmental arm) projects that the number of cell phone users around the world will climb to two billion. Meanwhile, 130 million of these devices are thrown out annually.

Still:

The EPA acknowledges that toxins in electronics are a problem, but says there’s no need to panic–at least, not yet. [S]ays Clare Lindsay, project director for the EPA Office of Solid Waste’s extended product responsibility program. “The presence of some toxic materials does not create a crisis. We believe that landfills can safely manage most of these waste products. Is it the best idea? No, the better way is recycling. But we haven’t seen any contamination of ground water associated with electronics discarded in landfills.”

Keep in mind that discarded paper typically has no toxic chemicals. But I digress.

Less than 20% of electronic devices discarded between 2003 and 2005 were sent to recycling facilities; the rest were dumped and mostly ended up in landfills. In 2005 about 61% (107,500 tons) of cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors and televisions collected for recycling were exported outside the U.S. for remanufacture or refurbishment, the EPA says. That same year, about 24,000 tons of CRT glass—which is filled with lead to protect viewers from the x-rays produced by the monitor—was sold to markets abroad to replace damaged CRTs in various countries, and North American waste and recycling companies recovered about 10,000 tons of lead (meaning it was not placed into landfills or incinerated).

An added benefit of recycling electronic materials—be they copper, lead or silicon—is that we will not have to mine as much from the earth, says Bob Dellinger, the EPA Office of Solid Waste's director of hazardous waste identification. “In essence, recycling stretches the raw materials we have available,” he says. A lot of energy is wasted in the mining and refining of raw materials. For example, only 4% of copper ore is usable, the rest is waste.

There are tons and tons of data online concerning e-waste. And it is entirely posisble that in the near future, landwills will be clogged with printed reports on the clogging of landfills (that’s how I like my irony). The point is not to condemn electronic media or new devices—many of which are only peripherally associated with marketing—nor to hold up printers as exemplars of environmental sustainability and stewardship, but simply to point out that “green” is very often a gray area. And while the complixity of the issue can make people want to just throw up their hands in despair and give up on the whole thing, the fact is that everything has environmental consequences and if we are serious about environmental responsibility, a lot of education, thought, and consideration are required.

Posted by Richard Romano on May 12, 2008 | Comments (0)