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

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.