The Environmental Impact of EBooks

Americans buy more than 3 billion books a year, using up 20 million trees. Erika Engelhaupt has written an excellent article that discusses the environmental impact of e-books. According to her, if you substituted 20 physical books and 2 newspapers daily with a electronic version of the same, you would save almost one tree. It was also surprising to learn that Americans consume an average 1500 lb of paper annually!

With regard to paper textbooks, she quotes a leading edge researcher - Greg Kozak - who found that "over its life cycle, a paper textbook created 4 times the greenhouse gas emissions of an e-book reader and several times more ozone-depleting substances and chemicals associated with acid rain. Conventional books also required more than 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water consumption than e-books."

It will be interesting to see if e-books make a significant impact on improving the environment over the next 25 -50 years ...