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Comment by swah | Hacker News Reader

What about environment?

What about? More wasted paper ≈ more planted trees. Wood (and thus paper) is renewable resource or did I miss something? I guess you can worry about transport costs but than perhaps it'd be better to optimise where it matters — like bottled water.

Recycling paper takes a lot of energy and water use, not to mention harsh chemical bleaching. Sorry to burst your "use paper, it's recyclable" mentality. I was disappointed when someone burst mine, too.

There is a reason for the order in "reduce, reuse, recycle"...

I didn't say anything about recycling actually. I'm not really looking to discuss this much further, just please do not put words into my mouth.

Apologies, I read you wrong. Renewable resource because it's trees, not because you can recycle it. Eeek. Someone slap me.

Sure, unless they buy the wood from a third world country where corruption is a major issue and influential people can cut forests down and then sell the wood and use a percentage of that to bribe the authorities. Then the real estate people come and houses get built instead of those forests. That's what happens where I live, anyway...

I try not to think of that especially there's still a question mark whether we can roll out the #1 issue.

But if it really gone big (a lot of people ordered the printed version), we certainly can devote a percentage of revenue towards planting trees.

Buying paper pretty much is devoting a percentage of revenue towards planting trees.

I don't follow the logic?

Paper-making companies own, and care for, a lot of trees.

The manufacture of paper does not involve cutting down virgin forests nowadays - trees are specifically planted to be used as paper. No one is "killing a tree" when they print anything - if they didn't print it, we'd plant less trees to make paper with.

There's more involved than just trees here. The environment doesn't just involve plants?

It takes energy to produce trees, cut them down, make paper, transport paper, print magazines, distribute magazines, throw away magazines and then (hopefully) recycle it.

This isn't a solved problem. Far from it. Why not just distribute it digitally.

I think printing yesterday's news on a piece of dead tree, transporting it and then selling it is a stupid idea...

That's another kettle of fish, and you're right on most counts, except I'd lose the "it's stupid" attitude - people 'waste' resources in satisfying their tastes in many ways. We can keep haggling about the price till the cows come home.

Actually, coming back to the trees for paper-making, you can add to the downsides that usually the trees are fast-growing (e.g. eucalyptus), not 'nobler' woods (even humble pines are too slow). And the mills do smell a bit - in a particular highway route, I can tell when I'm driving past one mill I can't see. On the other hand, the process does capture carbon from CO2 ...

P.S. A good argument can be made that 'wasting resources' is the basis of human civilization, without which we'd be living in caves and frugally feeding on berries. Check out what happened because of luxuries like silk and condiments like pepper ...

If they use MagCloud you should be able to order it as a PDF.

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