Pulp Fiction – just how carbon friendly is e-viewing?

Our online, wireless world promises many things – amongst them, greater accessibility and connectivity to everyone, everywhere at anytime. Compared to the past ours is a world less dependent on paper and its printed form. Everything we need, our files and contacts, we can carry in a handbag or suit pocket. So far, so environmentally friendly.

But is it really? The jury is still out.

Sainsbury’s distribute their annual reports and accounts online claiming environmental reasons. However, that technology is easy to use makes it easy to forget that there is a huge infrastructure humming away behind the scenes. Perhaps global marketeers’ success at ‘greenwashing’ their product stories helps us forget that factories, and communication networks have to be built and supplied with a constant source of power simply to enable us to live our lives the way we’re now accustomed.

In the Laurence Berkley National Laboratory, California they’ve calculated that the data centres that drive the Internet already consume one per cent of global electricity capacity; and that their consumption is growing at seventeen per cent per year (New Scientist, 4 October, 2008).

By contrast, the physicality of the printed pages shows rather than hides the resources that go into them. Though printed media also necessitates large-scale production it can also be claimed to be more sustainable than it’s electronic counterpart. 2004 figures show that recycled paper and board provided 74% of all source materials manufactured in the UK.

That said, whatever method you employ to read this article– online, or in print – there are different potential environmental impacts. But perhaps now is simply the time to re-address how we cast the printed media - not so much as the bad-guy, but rather as the equal to its online counterpart.