For those of us who cherish the habit of a newspaper over coffee each morning,
the gloomy harbingers are mounting; the Web-only reconfiguration or total
collapse in the US of hoary nameplates such as The Seattle Pose-Intelligencer
and The Rocky Mountain News; the $800 million bailout for French newspapers
proposed by president Nicolas Sarkozy; and layoffs and page consolidations
at papers everywhere including at my employer. The New York Times.
Says Paul Gillin, the operator of the website Newspaper Death Watch; In an
electronically mediated world, where frictionless access to information is
the norm. “the high fixed cost of print publishing makes the major metro
newspaper business model unsustainable”.
Insiders and armchair analysts might quibble over the real root of the industry’s
woes, but a move last week by Marriott International, the global hotel and
resort chain, suggested that, in an increasingly carbon-conscious world, newspapers
have another sort of sustainability to worry about.
The hotelier announced that is would no longer deliver newspapers automatically
to the doors of its guests.
Guests who request delivery of a paper will still receive one, the company
said. Those who don’t, won’t.
“Based on preliminary data, the company projects that newspaper distribution
will be reduced by about 50,000 papers daily or 13 million papers annually,
thereby avoiding 10,350 tonnes of carbon emissions.”
There are plenty of reasons to believe that noting the carbon savings was
a specious move on Marriott’s part – a bit of green spin on an
otherwise straightforward cost-cutting measure. But the implication was inescapable:
the decline in newspaper readership was being expressed as an environmental
victory.
One study, published in 2004, compared the cradle – to grave environmental
implications of reading. The New York Times the old-fashioned way with reading
it on a personal digital assistant, or PDA. The conclusion: Receiving the
news on a PDA results in big carbon dioxide, water and nitrogen and sulfur
oxides.
Not certain that consumers were reading newspapers on PDAs as much as browsing
the news using computers and laptops, I asked Michael W. Toffel, a co-author
of that study and a fellow at Harvard University’s environmental economics
provramme, whether he had crunched the numbers.
He had not, but in venturing a guess, Toffel said it was likely that computers
would still win an environmental showdown with newsprint. “Paper manufacturing
and distribution is so water-and energy-intense,” he said. “I
think it would be hard to overcome that.”
Discouraged, I turned to a more recent analysis, published in 2007 out of
the KTH Center for Sustainable Communications in Stockholm.
The study compared a print newspaper with its Web counterpart – as well
as with a version delivered to an electronic tablet reader – in an abbreviated
sort of life cycle analysis that considered major inputs such as energy used
for editorial work, production of paper or electronic components and so forth.
The results were interesting.
Times spent online, for instance, mattered. So, too, did the locale. In the
Swedish market alone, reading the news online for 10 minutes, or even for
30 minutes, or using the tablet reader, resulted in lower CO2 emissions than
reading a physical newspaper.
In the wider European market, however, things tablet or reading online for
just 10 minutes generated less CO2 than the printed product. But when the
time spent reading online was increased to 30 minutes, the printed product
proved more eco-friendly.
What does this mean? Hard to say, Certainly differences in power generation
matter.
About two-thirds of Sweden’s energy, for example comes from nuclear
or hydropower both of which produce negligible carbon dioxide emissions. That
means using electricity to read the news online there is less costly in climate
terms.
Make the baseline all of Europe, however – with its more widespread
use of natural gas and coal in power generation and the picture changes.
One might reasonably conclude that the same would be true in the coal-rich
US. At some temporal tipping point, might reading a newspaper online become
a greater resource drain and climate burden than tucking into a printed edition
over the hot cup of coffee?
