Jan 20 2009
Paperless papers good for the climate
Newspapers have recently started to emerge from the paper-and-ink cocoons in which they were birthed and came of age.
Two months ago, on its 100th anniversary, the Christian Science Monitor announced plans to move to a web-first format by April. Last week, the daily Kansas City Kansan ceased print operations after 87 years and went online-only, while the 127-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced it would go online-only or die within 60 days.
Even the staid American Society of Newspaper Editors, so-named since 1922, may drop “paper” from its title.
Some say these actions foreshadow a wholesale sloughing-off of the newspaper industry’s dead-tree skin. Changing demographics, the Internet, a global recession and crippling debt have conspired to set off a sea change in the way news is delivered.
But lost among all the browbeating and hand-wringing about the future of newspapers – and journalism – is the idea that moving toward an online-only news delivery system might actually be good for the environment. In dire economic times the environment often gets short shrift in favour of the bottom line. Newspapers are going online for economic reasons, not environmental ones.
That there are good environmental reasons to stop printing newspapers seems obvious. Steve Faguy, a copy editor for the Montreal Gazette, depends on newspapers for his living. Yet he says it’s a no-brainer that printing newspapers harms the environment.
“I don’t think you can seriously argue it,” he said. “If you consider the whole process – making the paper, printing it, distributing it with trucks, etc. – every step has carbon emissions involved.”
About a year ago, Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson seriously argued it. In one of his typically thought-provoking posts, the Internet-age thinker made the case that distributing news through printed magazines and newspapers is actually better for the environment than doing it electronically over the web.
His argument, in brief, was that a good way to reduce carbon in the atmosphere would be to cut down trees, bury them in the ground, plant new trees, and repeat. That’s because trees sequester carbon, a component of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. Burying them removes carbon from the atmosphere and stores it safely away.
Which is essentially what happens in the newsprint cycle: we grow trees then cut them down to make newsprint, which eventually gets buried in landfills. That amounts to a process for burying carbon. Therefore, the argument continues, printing newspapers and magazines is carbon-negative (good).
Distributing news via websites, meanwhile, requires electricity to run the computers and other machines that make up the Internet. Since fossil fuels produce most electricity, electronic distribution is carbon-positive (bad).
“So by this analysis dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than web media,” Anderson concludes on his blog. “We cut down trees and put them in the ground. From a climate change perspective, this is a good thing.”
Anderson declined to comment on his argument when contacted for this story, citing the high emotions around environmental issues.
“I’d rather not stick my neck out much more on that subject,” he said. “It was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and I’m not an environmental expert.”
Emotions run high because the consequences of environmental catastrophe are potentially so severe. Everybody wants to do the right thing, but all too often assumptions about what is good for the environment aren’t right. We end up doing more harm than good.
Toronto Star energy and environment reporter Tyler Hamilton calls this the law of unintended consequences.
“That’s when something that we tried to do ended up causing other problems,” he said. “A good example of this is the push for compact fluorescent light bulbs. They contain mercury, which is a problem at the end of their lives. And the light they give off makes some people sick.”
So will online-only delivery of newspapers have the unintended – and unexpected – consequence of hurting the environment? Hamilton doesn’t think so.
“It’s pretty well established that electronic delivery systems are easier on the environment than physical ones,” he said.
According to Catharine Grant of the environmental non-profit ForestEthics, Canada’s boreal forest loses an acre every minute to forestry. She’s concerned about the effect logging has on species diversity.
“One species that’s really in trouble right now is the Woodland Caribou,” she said. “They really cannot tolerate any logging.”
Ontario and Quebec lose over 55 million trees every year to daily newspapers, said Shiloh Bouvette. She campaigns for greener newspaper practices on behalf of Market Initiatives, which, despite its name, is a group dedicated to stopping “the consumption of the world’s ancient and endangered forests.”
Much of that paper goes to the United States. Overall, North Americans consume almost 10 million tonnes of newsprint every year, Bouvette said. According to a 2006 British study, each tonne of newsprint translates into just under a tonne of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. That includes fossil fuels consumed at every stage of a newspaper’s life, from its beginnings in Canada’s boreal forests to its end in a landfill or recycling centre.
That means North Americans belch almost 10 million tonnes of carbon emissions every year by reading newspapers. And that’s not all.
“The paper industry is the third largest energy-consuming sector in the world,” said Bouvette. “It consumes massive amounts of water, produces significant amounts of greenhouse gases and devastates fragile forest ecosystems – storehouses of billions of tonnes of carbon.”
Compare that to getting news online. Even using worst-case assumptions, all newspaper websites combined would generate about 2.5 million tonnes worth of CO2 emissions per year, according to numbers gathered from various Internet sources. Not a trivial amount by any means, but only one quarter of the emissions caused by printing them.
“My laptop is going to be on no matter what – it makes no difference whether I look at some news or not,” said Faguy. “So the power usage is effectively zero. But ask anyone who gets a newspaper and they’ll tell you it forms a very large part of the weekly recycling bin.”
3 Responses to “Paperless papers good for the climate”
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The key flaw in Anderson's argument is that he doesn't consider industrial and transportation costs. The amount of carbon stored in a sheet of newspaper is negligible compared to the amount burned in the machine that cut down the tree, the trucks that brought the wood to the pulp factory, the pulp factory itself, the truck that brought the paper to the newspaper presses, the presses themselves and finally the trucks that deliver the newspapers to homes.
To be fair, Anderson's argument concerns magazines, which are delivered through regular mail, and he argues that there are no carbon consequences there (which is debatable).
But to consider that even a single part of this process is equivalent to a single computer emitting photons while consulting an online article is silly on its face.
[...] away free. Even a subscription to a print newspaper only helps offset the cost of that outdated and environmentally-unsound delivery [...]
It’s unfortunate that so much of this column gave space to someone who admitted, “It was a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and I’m not an environmental expert.”
This is a gross understatement. His claim that “we bury trees in the ground” as result of making magazines and therefore they are good for the climate is woefully inaccurate and misleading.
In fact, logging trees to make paper, or any other forest product, generates tremendous losses of forest carbon by destroying not only the above ground vegetation that is storing carbon but also the carbon in the soil, which is a significant but often overlooked source of carbon emissions.
Further, the newspapers and magazines that are not recycled and landfilled instead, do not simply turn into buried carbon as Anderson assumes. Paper begins decomposing when it hits the landfill and in the process it emits methane, a greenhouse gas over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide in terms of it’s impact on climate change.
In short, when adding the massive amount of greenhouse gases that are emitted at each stage in the paper lifecycle — from tree harvest to landfill decomposition — printed newspapers and magazines are far from being a good thing from a climate perspective, to say the least.
Thanks to Shiloh Bouvette for lending some facts to this article. Always a good idea to consult the nonprofit experts rather than those who have something to gain — and money to lose — by drawing their own non-expert conclusions.
Shannon Binns
Program Manager
Green Press Initiative