It seems easy to find fault with printing for its environmental impact. Millions of trees dead. Gone to the mill to serve our gigantic needs for paper products. Dead trees are a sort of poster-child for environmental destruction. Electronic media is in, dead trees are out, we are told.
While we won’t greenwash the effect of pernicious forestry practices (even certifications such as those from the “Forest Stewardship Council” are suspiciously tied to corporate interests), there is good reason to believe that much of the trend towards “all things digital” is equally the product of industry manipulation.
As a culture, we exalt the digital lifestyle, cradling our new iPads and demanding ever-increasing levels of computer power and industrial-scaled “server farms” to support our need for internet communication, social networking and entertainment. Few are willing to muse on the tremendous energy use incurred by these habits or on the gigantic mountains of plastic and silicon waste and toxic refuse generated by the digital lifestyle. This blog post is ironically dedicated to the poor worker in Thailand who is asked to take apart old computers to salvage what she can and to live among the toxic ruins of what she can’t.

One of the more compelling sound bites refuting the environmental advantage of electronic media over print is the calculation by a Harvard scientist that “performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea.”  See this article for more details of the analysis.
U.S. Department of Energy reports in Printing Impressions (10-09) that paper manufacturers used 75 billion kilowatts of energy in 2006, compared to 60 billiion kilowatts used by electronic data centers, which doesn’t even include the energy used by millions upon millions of home and business PCs. Moreover, an average American’s annual paper use is produced by 500 kilowatts-hours of electricity, the same amount required to one computer on for five months. Reading the Daily News print edition generates 20% less CO2 than reading the news on the web for a half hour.
At Red Sun, we use recycled paper for virtually everything, and 100% post-consumer recycled paper for an increasing number of jobs. Our paper sources use very little virgin growth and no old-growth whatsoever.
We were recently accredited a City of Boston certificate as a Sustainable Business Leader for efforts we took as a small business to improve our energy efficiency reduce our environmental impact. We think a lot about these things and I would love to hear any informed discussion on this.