Ah yes, the curious question of which is greener, newsprint vs. online. I thought going in what the answer was going to be, so when the first source I consulted supported my bias, I thought I was home free.
This Feb. 14, 2008 paper called Estimating Energy Use and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Internet Advertising would lead one to believe that Internet perusal of news sources is somewhat "greener" than reading the same items in a printed newspaper. Hurrah, done deal.
Of course, the science is somewhat dense, and the charts and graphs labeled with sufficiently obscure or impenetrable terms that nothing is certain, but the conclusion - based on calculations of the relative values of the two news sources (the latter based on end-use equipment and servers), does seem to indicate that Internet is the greener choice, if only because the energy intensity of the Internet has declined considerably in recent years while its subscriber base has risen.
This decline in energy use, most evident from 2000 to 2006, is largely due to improved equipment offering greater speeds at wider bandwidths for the same amount of energy, because even though Internet traffic grew by more than a factor of 205 during the period mentioned above, energy use merely doubled. The figures are based on an estimated nearly 83,000,000 million users as of 2006.
Since Internet has supplanted some print media, and is projected to take the place of even more as newspapers fall to an ongoing recession (at least ten more likely to follow in the footsteps of the now-defunct New York Sun and the even more recently perished Rocky Mountain News out of Denver, Colorado) it strikes this writer as unexpectedly good news that my interminable online daily search for newsworthy environmental issues isn't simultaneously killing a small chunk of the planet.
If the above were a single report, I could have accepted it at face value and breathed a sigh of relief, but another report, dating from 2007 and featured in the U.K. version of the Press Gazette chain of newspapers, shows that getting news online is only more environmentally friendly if you read for less than 30 minutes a day, and what's the chance of that, at least in my line of work? Things were starting to look a bit more complicated.
This study, conducted by researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and financed by a newspaper research firm (STFI-Packforskon) and the Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association, seems considerably more biased and less believable, and I was initially inclined to dismiss it out of hand.
Sampling a single newspaper - the Swedish newspaper Sundsvalls Tidning - the study concludes that reading actual newspapers generates 28 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) per reader per year. Online perusal of the same newspaper, for only a half-hour a day, results in 35 kilograms of CO2 per reader per year. The caveat, "in the European context", is never fully explained, though the study does go on to add that, in Sweden, which has less polluting forms of energy production than Europe, the printed form of news has the greatest environmental impact.
I'm sure you've seen the same problem I have with these statistics. First, the print version doesn't specify time, since any printed newspaper is available for unlimited perusal once the damage (i.e., printing) is done.
The second problem is with the Swedish energy citation, which says that printed newspapers are the most impactful, even while affirming that Sweden's cleaner forms of energy should make the Internet less impactful. If this is true, a study of print versus Internet conducted with a Swedish newspaper should not produce the results the study mentions. Of course, I was still in denial at this point (or perhaps merely confused by all the technical statistics).
The study, called a "simplified life-cycle assessment", took into account many (but not all) aspects of both forms of publishing, from paper production to distribution on the one hand, to the energy used by all the electronic devices - and the disposal impacts of old PCs, monitors and server modules - on the other. It did not include journalists' travel, the production of e-reader screens (i.e., Amazon's Kindle), or internet infrastructure.
Drawing a final conclusion - that paper is the greatest environmental impact for print publishing, and electricity the greatest for Internet publishing - the study seems decidedly skewed in favor of print, until I read a similar study published in 2006 in the Trinity Mirror showing that producing a single printed copy of the newspaper created 182 grams of CO2.
A desktop PC, on the other hand, produces about 240 grams of CO2 per hour. Which leads me to the highly undesirable but unavoidable conclusion that, if I'm using my computer for more than 45 minutes a day to read the news, I'm creating the same amount of pollution as a single newspaper. The eight hours I actually spend is enough newsprint to line every bird cage from Minneapolis to Chicago - and that's just one day!
In another analysis which supports the first two, the online publication The Stranger (which calculates the emissions for a single issue of the paper at 71 grams per week) goes on to state that, for the average reader, two hours online equals the carbon impact of the print version. Since The Stranger is out of Seattle, where techies rule, I feel confident my assumptions have been thoroughly vetted.
In the final analysis, I'm forced to admit that print is greener than the Internet for most users, and would be greener still if those papers used 100-percent, post-consumer recycled paper that had not been bleached or otherwise cleaned up.
In my case, which involves a minimum of eight hours staring at a monitor to find environmentally relevant news clips, the weighted average of print versus Internet doesn't even bear contemplation. But hey, I can offer this in my defense: at least I'm not drinking bottled water, or driving an SUV to work, and I'm spreading the word about important environmental topics. That's got to count for something.
Related Reading:
The Economy or the Environment? "Both" Say Half of Americans
Turning the Tide: New Energy Technology
Ah yes. It's always more complicated than we would like it to be. And just think how much energy your brain used trying to process all those statistics! The CO2 levels in your office must have been soaring!
Of course the answer is that we really need to look at every single instance on a case-by-case basis. For me in a New Zealand (where we use a lot of hydro electric generation) living in a city where the newspaper doesn't have to travel far to get to me once printed, my stats are going to be very different from someone else in another country or even in another town.
Also I suspect I would get very different results in winter - especially in a cold winter where the power generation authorities add filthy coal-powered electricity to the national grid!
To do justice to all the theories we would need to plug in all the relevant data for each individual into a super-computer and have it print out a recommendation for that individual (possibly a different recommendation for every day of the year). The recommendations would need to be updated regularly to take into account changes in technology and cultural shifts resulting in changed energy use for each news source.
Ah, the irony.
Written in March 2009