Is Digital Media Worse for the Environment Than Print?

From the comments:

"Consider This:

* It takes 12 trees to produce a ton of printing paper—24 trees for higher grade writing paper.*

* A mature tree can produce as much oxygen in a season as 10 people inhale in a year.

* Only 5% of the paper used in the book industry is recycled.

* Up to 35% of books printed for consumers (down from nearly 60% several years ago) are never read. They are returned to the publisher and end up in landfills.

* 71% of the world's paper supply comes from natural forests, rather than tree farms

* Paper mills dump gallons of chemical bleaches and solvents into local watersheds every hour of every day.

* Conservatree—Trees Into Paper

World Business Council for Sustainable Development

You want to beat up on coal, go ahead. We need desperately to switch to less polluting power sources. But suggesting that paper is more environmentally friendly than digital media is laughable."

Regarding deforestation, it seems less digital media's direct blame, and more a national and state-level issue of how we run our power grids. Coal's a nasty piece of work anyhow - the radiation they emit, along with the pollutants they generate, are enough to make even an ex-nuclear submariner acquaintance of mine shudder, and the guy's outright blase about anything short of actually being in a reactor without a suit. We should really, really be making effort to moving away from that technology anyhow.

However, e-waste? That's legitimate. The EU's e-waste regulations goes some way in at least limiting the environmental damage, but it's a far cry from enough. DARPA's callout for more energy-efficient computing devices helps, but pretty much the only argument in favor of electronics, in terms of how "green" they are, is that while they're more energy-intensive to make per unit, they make up for it in terms of information density and reusability by the order of quite a few magnitudes.

Yes, digital media uses natural resources. Print media uses natural resources.

Until environmental impact is part of the economic equation (as argued by Natural Capitalism: http://www.amazon.com/Natural-Capitalism-Creating-Industrial... ) it will always be one evil vs. another.