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Comment by forgotmypw17 | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance, in my opinion. 40 million copies of a thick catalog with glossy pages means a couple shittons of not just trees but petroleum and petrochemicals for production, distribution, and disposal. Every year! And ten years ago, it was nearly 200. https://archive.is/rHAhG

Can you even imagine a stack of one million catalogs?

That's space, trees, plants, mammals, birds, insects, mushrooms, ... all being squeezed for a glossy catalog, most of which will get thumbed through once or twice and sent to the landfill to rot.

These catalogs do not biodegrade well, by the way, because they're not just paper.

I love paper books, and I enjoyed browsing this catalog just like many others in this thread, and yet I don't think I will miss this one. Hopefully, other thick glossy catalogs will follow suit.

Production of catalogs like this squeezes our biome, and if we don't turn back, it will pop, and we'll be left with only enough resources for a small fraction of us to survive.

View on HN

There is a ton of misconceptions out there about paper. Not saying using less isn't a good thing, so.

Most paper uses a very decent amount of recycled paper, has ti actually. To the point the industry faced issues last Q1 when demand went down and there wasn't enough recycled paper on the market. Trees are grown explicitly for paper production, and are regrown in the same forests. Net forest losses are mainly due to farming, e.g. in the Amazon region. Energy wise, paper production offers great opportunities to balance the grid.

Most paper, at least in Europe, is actually recycled.

And electronics do have there issues as well. They consume raw earthes, are consumed as well, end up in land fills and also have quite extensive supply chains and CO2 foot prints. And they consume electricity, which has to produced. And we are nowhere near the necessary levels of renewables.

I do support getting rid of useless paper consumption, it just not as straight forward as it seems.

Well, that covers the paper, for the most part. Thanks for explaining that.

Now, let's talk about the other components:

the ink (petrochemicals, for the most part)

the production, transportation, and containers for the ink

the runoff into our biosphere from the ink production

the transportation of the paper to the printing facility

the binding (glue)

the transportation of the catalogs to the stores

the plastic wrap and other packaging for the catalogs

the labor put into it (perhaps those people could be paid to rest instead? probably better for everyone all-around)

Did I miss anything?

How many dead, displaced, or injured animals do you think that is per catalog? How many humans harmed by exposure to manufactured poison? How many gallons of diesel extracted, transported, refined, transported again, and burned? How many dozen pieces of trucks, trains, and container ships mined, produced, and worn down? Is it still better than viewing the same catalogs online on an already existing computer screen?

Every single artefact produced by our system has a similar footprint. It's not just money cost. And I think it's worth considering.

Transportation has propably the highest negative impact, paper is aheavy bulk product after all. Animal impact, i would say comparativley low. We are talking about decades old economic forests here (there are of course exception which should be prosecuted to the fullest where ever possible). In Europa at least, these activities are not having any more negative impact on wild life. Again, these are not age old natural forestsanymore and haven't been for quite a while.

I am not saying pushing the catalogue to digital is a net negative, no idea how that could even be reliably quantified. Just that paper and print production is by no means as negative to the environment as is believed.

are you saying there are no beings who live in those woods and are displace?

I generally agree with your direction. That said, this is incredibly hard to quantify (and also: [1]); because wildlife is not uniformly negatively affected in a clear-cut area. Any "artificial" intervention by humans will favour some animals and harm others. Ignoring the fact that it was probably humans who first cleared out primordial forests, the very act of re-planting a forest probably negatively impacted those species who don't thrive in a forest setting.

I'd say having such forests which are relatively unmolested for several years before being harvested are less negative than clearing them out and placing say farms in their place. So, overall it's not the biggest thing to go after, but then, I'm no expert.

[1] also depends greatly on what type of cutting we're talking about. I would say it's clear that illegal and / or legal but permanent deforestation is a negative. Above, I'm talking about forests which are planted and re-planted to obtain their wood.

good points.

How do you think?

https://e360.yale.edu/assets/site/_1260x709_crop_center-cent...

looks cozy. i'd live in there. :)

So guess the animals would too… if you had them food brought in. Not much undergrowth to feed off.

Where there's soil undisturbed, there are insects. Where there are insects, there are larger creatures. Of course, undergrowth would help.

I think it's safe to say that there is no wildlife in Europe, so this is more or less correct.

Are you sure about that? This page suggests otherwise:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fauna_of_Europe

> I think it's safe to say that there is no wildlife in Europe, so this is more or less correct.

You don't go out too much, do you? In my municipality we have wolves - at a population density of 214 ppl/km² no less. Since there's no recorded killings of livestock by wolves and they have to eat something, it's save to assume we're OK on boars and deer, too. Not to mention the rabbits, hares, badgers, various songbirds, birds of prey, insects and other critters I encounter on a daily basis when walking the dog. Through the local woods. Which are very much filled with wildlife.

edit: I got the population density wrong - it's actually much lower if the entire area is considered, not just the town :) the correct figure including all land would be ~45 ppl/km².

In a commercial wood farm? Not really, no. That's a big problem with them - they're dead apart from the trees being farmed.

(Seeing Like A State, etc)

> Did I miss anything?

You missed coatings, which can include minerals or plastics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coated_paper

Thanks for this, I forgot.

One of the reasons they do not degrade well.

energy

But are you sure this is not all dwarfed by the overall quantities and volumes which IKEA produces, transports and sells? i.e. the furniture, decorations, fittings, textiles etc. ?

Precisely, never mind the hundreds of kitchen gadgets they own and the fact that they drove to IKEA in a big truck to buy cheap furniture.

I don't own, nor purchase any kitchen gadgets, nor do I drive a truck, nor do I buy furniture.

You're right, of course. The catalog is dwarved by all the other products that come out of Ikea. I personally don't partake in buying them for 10+ years now, because I think about the stuff above. Plenty of furniture I can get without pulling on that supply chain.

Possibly true, but so what? Every little bit helps and this seems like an easy win, ecologically speaking.

I hate to think how much junk mail I receive every year. We use a 14 gallon recycling bin and it's about half full of waste paper mail EVERY WEEK in the USA. Catalogs, flyers, credit card offers, loan offers, etc. It's disgusting and I can't opt out.

> Every little bit helps and this seems like an easy win, ecologically speaking.

It is likely not helpful if IKEA gets to enjoy the image of an environmentally-friendly eneterprise based on a token gesture. Many companies engage in such gestures to get themselves off the hook for their involvement in problematic practices.

I'm not saying that it's IKEA's fault that people buy throw-away furniture, or that the population is growing etc, but still.

Yep. Same for Apple: "We're leaving out the charger for your $1000 phone. It's for the environment, we promise."

But, I'll take any environment win I can get at this point.

I agree, but to me it is still like holding a cup over your head while it is raining outside and functionally does almost nothing except spread the fake idea that we are actually turning society green. Paper in general is probably one of the least things we should be worried about because it is one of the easiest things to farm and uses minimal input compared to the bulk of material it produces.

What should we be concerned with even more, in your opinion?

And how would someone who spends money reduce their complicity?

They are very good at minimizing packaging. Also, my kids use my IKEA dresser that I had when I was younger, bought in 1989. I had to replace the rails and a few of the knobs, but it's still in fantastic shape even after going through several changes of residence.

Just throwing this out there -- it's not like all of this stuff is ending in the trash. This dresser is over 30 years old now.

Now do computers and computer screens.

Exactly.

This is why I have not bought a new computer in 10+ years, and have only used hand-me-downs for the last 8, with a similar track record on mobile devices.

That 10 yr old computer can browse a catalog.

Why? I'm going to have my computer anyway. Moving the catalog to 100% digital is a win.

Pulp production.

You are talking about books in general right?

Well, yes, although glossy pages create some extra impact.

However, if the book in question is one which will be kept for a while, actually read or referred to, perhaps it is a more worthwhile endeavor?

Compare that to the other end of the spectrum, e.g. supermarket ads, most of which do not even leave the plastic bag which carries them into someone's front yard and straight into the trash.

Or 95% of mail. My daily route is front door -> mailbox -> trash -> front door.

That's not really an argument against paper catalogs specifically, it looks more like an argument against consumerism in general.

But taken to the logical conclusion, that argument can look rather hypocritical, for example why is the discussion about paper vs electronic catalogs for buying furniture and not about why we even need beds and chairs to begin with, while people in japan are fine w/ futons[0] and kotatsu[1]?

One can take the argument to extremes and argue that amazonian forests burning in Brazil are partly due to you and I existing and needing to eat and wanting to have kids who need to be fed.

It's clearly a slippery slope, and if one draws the moral line to make others bad, while conveniently claiming to be "kosher" themselves, that's not really a convincing line.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kotatsu

Neither futon nor kotatsu add any vertical space to the room as opposed to having a bed or a table with drawers underneath

In the context of this discussion (i.e. the suggestion that consumerism is bad from an environmental impact perspective), that'd actually qualify as a feature of futons/kotatsu.

Using more vertical space means I need a narrower living space which means cities can be more compact.

So I don’t think it would qualify.

Sort of the whole point of a futon is that you put it in the closet during the day so you can reuse the space as your living room. Your bed just takes space that you don't use for 2/3 of the day.

Similarly, kotatsu don't require chairs.

You should see how compact things are in Japan :)

Kotatsu does add some space to the room, since it's a table - you keep your legs under it and now you can put stuff on top.

Anything taken to an extreme becomes absurd, sure. You're right that my argument is not just against paper catalogs, but against consumerism in general.

However, my aim is not to take it to the extreme, nor to suggest that we shouldn't eat. It's merely to introduce a measure of "seventh generation" thinking and consideration into buying habits, beyond the amount of funds it takes to procure something.

If I take it further than sounds comfortable to you in my own life, it is only show what is possible, and to shift the needle of normal a little bit towards the direction of prudence and restraint.

Do we still need food? Of course! Do we need a place to sleep comfortably? Of course we do, and I do not suggest othrwise.

But what about new clothes when we already have quite a few sets which are still good, or a new pair of shoes when we still have a couple which are just a bit scuffed?

My argument is to consider the full systemic impact of buying those items, something no one else will do for us, before going through with it. If you consider this idea next time you are about to buy something, that each {dollar} spent comes back around in so many ways to harm us and our close relatives on the biological tree of live, then I will consider my writing a success.

I think your argument is the one falling down the slippery slope. How does considering protecting the environment to be good inevitably lead to arguments against both our existences when a line can be clearly drawn at the point where protection is advocated only so far as to maximize humanity's survival? This extreme is so clearly on the opposite side of that line compared to eradicating paper catalogs which honestly isn't going to kill anyone or stop us from "feeding our kids".

I'm not saying one necessarily implies the other. That was reductio ad absurdum precisely to demonstrate that any argument of this type, no matter how sensible or true, can be considered dismissible by someone.

I'm speaking to the idea of in-groups vs out-groups. For example, think about veganism and how their activism generally falls on deaf ears outside of their own circles. Bringing supply chain arguments to this discussion is very similar in the sense that they are strictly true but easily dismissible by someone who doesn't share the same set of values/priorities.

The line of argument might potentially even be self-defeating, for example, if the takeaway is that electronic catalogs > paper catalogs, never mind the rare earth mines and sweatshops in china and that drawers in ikea furniture still invite further consumerism. That's a very very different takeaway than "geez I should buy less stuff".

I'm not fluent in this logic lingo, but I don't think there's a point in pointing out that someone might believe in the absurd if its, well, absurd. Yes, surely there are crazy people who will jump down every slippery slope to misinterpret the very simple proposition that something, all things considered and along the line I have stated before, makes the world better, by taking it to the absurd, but I don't think arguing on this person's behalf like you are doing is particularly worthwhile if you even acknowledge that the slippery slope is absurd.

You are right, but it would be possible to produce like 99% of that from trees, if we bothered to spend to effort. You can distill trees into petroleum products, however doing so breaks the illusion of how much organic material we are burning through with just a single gallon of fuel or oil. Rather than thinking "its just a single gallon of gas" it turns into "well that as at least like 3-4 trees worth of fuel."

How much energy and water goes into recycling? Collecting, sorting, processing?

Trees grown explicitly for paper still require energy to plant, manage, cut and still represents a habitat loss. Europe has absolutely obliterated its forests. Anything that isn't a net gain is a major issue at this point.

Please don't use "Europe" when comparing unless it applies to all 50 countries.

Norway has actually increased the number of trees in the last 100 years.

In 1925 the volume of Norway’s forests was 300 million cubic meters of wood. Today it adds up to 900 million cubic meters.

Source: https://sciencenorway.no/enviroment-forest-forskningno/norwe...

> Please don't use "Europe" when comparing unless it applies to all 50 countries.

As someone who lives in a smaller European country, I can empathize. At least on HN, it seems like both Europeans (in the regional sense) and non-Europeans are guilty of this. However, while the parent claim may or may not be accurate in this case, I think the use of "Europe" can reasonably be interpreted as referring to the region in aggregate, just as North America or Oceania might be used.

My larger problem with the parent and GP comments is that they both make specific claims about "Europe" that aren't self-evident without any citations.

That seems a bit unfair since I was replying to someone that was making positive generalization about Europe.

Also, at the risk of moving the goalpost, having more trees than some arbitrary point in time isn't particularly reassuring. In central Europe, at least, 1925 would have been near an all-time low. The deforestation in central and northern Europe has been going on for millennia (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-18646-7)

Not to forget, trees used in paper store a lot of CO2, CO2 that is not released until said paper is ultimately burned. Which takes a while.

As wth everything, hyper industrialisation didn't do anything good. Sustainability used to be a hallmark of forestry. If we could just go back to that, and adopt it to maximize CO2 capture, it would be great. As would be going back to pre-industrial animal farming, better for the animals, better for the environment, better for the farmers and better meat.

My understanding is that the recycling of paper is still quite an intensive chemical process requiring lots of water, bleaching chemicals etc.

Silviculture is an interesting subject, and while you're right that a lot of pulpwood is sourced from timber plantations, that isn't entirely benign. It is an an agricultural process and many use fertilizers (haber-bosch process, natural gas inputs), insecticides, and fungicides. On the production end, the modern kraft process plant still produces air and water pollution.

"Logging forests," "working forests" are not forests. They're tree farms. Calling them forests evokes a bunch of assumptions about conservation that are mostly not true about forestry trees.

We have a great deal of logging going on in temperate rainforests and there are whole swaths of the food chain that require moss growing on old growth trees. Clearcutting kills all of this. So does leaving a few trees intact, which is seen as some sort of improvement to conservation. It is not. Everything dies, it just dies slower. Most of the flora and fauna are adapted to full forest cover and high humidity. A copse of trees does not provide any of this. Summer comes and everything dries out.

We are still in need of a very different process for creating paper products. Fishing exclusion zones are an interesting model, but fish can move a lot farther than ferns, and a hell of a lot farther than moss and the habitat they provide. We may end up having to leaving a considerable amount of land intact (larger blocks, closer to everywhere) to avoid tree farm situations.

Calling the place were they grow trees for paper a forest is an exercise in grammatical pedantry at least. The flora and fauna in those places is not similar to a real forest at all.

I some cases they don't even provide the same amount of carbon capture because of all the energy spent on irrigation that wouldn't be necessary without the groundwork they do to make harvesting the trees easier.

Yeah more paper doesn't equal less trees, but it does equal less forests because you can't grow a real forest if you are constantly irrigating and harvesting trees.

I'm not sure it's misconception. When I was a student a very long time ago on holidays I used to work in a paper mill in various departments laboratory and engineering departments, mechanical, instrumentation, electrical etc. The UK paper making industry has (and had) been in decline for decades for many reasons but the main issue is cost, more specifically energy costs. Second to those costs were material resources.

This paper mill was a recycling paper mill and the cost to produce acceptable standard paper was enormous. It used an enormous amount of gas to feed it's huge boilers producing steam, it even had it's own water turbine generators fed by the local river it was built alongside to produce electricity. It supplemented this with electricity from the grid which was even more expensive. It's biggest customer I'm fairly sure was McDonalds

Pulp was shipped in from Norway because again it was cheaper, at that time 100% recycled paper was not profitable and pulp from the UK was too expensive. When the company went into administration most of it's equipment which was old even at that time was bought by companies from China.

This mill was old, dating back to 1880 and it's infrastructure was part of the reason of it's demise. But there were 2 other paper mills in the same small town that eventually met the same demise, one being a much more modern construction, however it lasted longer by specialising in more profitable products such as tissue.

The paper industry is not carbon efficient, it will be much more efficient than it used to be but it still takes a huge amount of energy to produce. In lower volume it could be but consumerism dictates it isn't, it's why China is the largest paper making country in the world now.

I do have some fond memories working there even though it was hard work, at christmas time when the mill would shutdown it was absolutely freezing and doing a 12 hour shift on boxing day working inside a 5 storey high boiler was maybe not so pleasant. There were some wonderful quirks about the place, where the turbine generators were you could climb below the workshop floor where the bypass outflow was and you'd find one or 2 people sitting on wooden girders above the water fishing on their lunch break

>Most paper, at least in Europe, is actually recycled.

Recycling is terrible too, you waste tons of fresh water to wash out the color and contaminate it with soap and all that toxic colors, and the glossy paper is even worse because it's normally not recyclable, so it's made to carton or burned.

"The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller’s hole, reading a book. It was a real book—onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent."

- Leviathan Wakes, James S. A. Corey

Great quote, thanks for posting it.

Books are not just decadent, they're also a reliable store of information which cannot be erased or altered easily without our knowledge.

There's immense and irreplaceable value in paper books, and I've taken to collecting the best ones.

I just don't think there's much value in this particular one.

Narp, I mean some will probably end up as collector's items in a hundred years, as a glance into 2021 design trends - 100 year old advertisements and catalogs are great collectibles and time capsules nowadays - but at the moment they're more of a nice to have for the next year or so. I do like leafing through things like that sometimes, but at the same time I don't mind going to the physical store for a browse. More useful.

As it relates, the only reason I could find that quote to reply to you was because I have the book in digital format. I remembered the word leather, and "leather" only appears in Leviathan Wakes 8 times, making it easy to find.

I love paper books as well, but I think the authors have prophetically captured the inevitable. Cutting down forests to only add tangibility to our bytes just isn't worth it.

The quote is particularly relevant when discussing space though. It's specifically the weight to data ratio that's called out as decadent. Something that's more relevant if you're used to travel with severe constraints on weight much more often than we are.

I agree that it's inevitable that things move that way - my only paper books in recent years have been to complete my collection of Ian Banks because that particular edition looks gorgeous, and Stålenhag's art books. I don't anticipate buying more paper copies of novels or textbooks unless there are books I can't find in digital version.

But at the same time, I just published a scifi novel and was surprised at how large a proportion of sales are still made up by paperback (not exactly selling millions, so it's not exactly a large sample of the market). It seems like it will take a long time before paper books become unusual to the point of being considered decadent.

Plenty of existing books to be found without having to source new ones.

Many, many books are being discarded these days, so I don't have to buy new, or buy at all.

Many towns' library systems do giveaways as well.

My old hometown's system used to do a semi-regular culling at the yearly mini arts & crafts fest in the park. They'd lay out 5 long rows of tables and cover them in old books that had to be retired. You could take as much as you could carry for a donation of any size.

I used to go when I was in my teens and had two dollars to rub together, and I still go back now in my 30's if I'm in town (with more of a donation). I've found some real gems.

Most paper books don't last. Paperbacks are printed on cheap acidic paper that yellows and eventually starts to crumble. The glue in the spine dries and cracks.

Hardbacks are more likely to last, and premium heirloom hardbacks = special print runs with special materials and extra assembly effort - are most likely to survive.

But for what? Most heirloom hardbacks are better-than-average novels for well-heeled fans and collectors, not a complete guide to rebuilding civilisation.

I'd be all for an apocalypse-beating Self-Study Handbook of The Important Stuff We Worked Out and Did, but good luck finding a publisher to fund what would be a massive project.

Some of the most valuable books have more to do with the inner world than the outer.

Other than binding, which can be re-done pretty easily, paperbacks are readable after 50-100 years.

The paper may yellow, but crumbling takes a bit longer.

You may have been unusually lucky. I barely dare open some of the paperbacks I bought in the 70s and 80s.

Although I have PDFs of all of them, so it doesn't matter. The fact that I can change the font size to make them legible now does, to me at least.

The hardbacks are still fine. (Except for the print size.)

You're in luck, someone already has [0]

[0] "The Knowledge" by Lewis Dartnell

I have several paperbacks that are getting close to their centenary. They are getting slightly fragile but that is a long way from saying that the content is unusable.

And I have several books published in the nineteen thirties and forties that would serve well to reboot civilization having comprehensive instructions for building all sorts of necessary machinery, buildings, clothes, etc. There were many such books with titles such as "Everything Within" and "The Handyman's Complete Self-Instructor".

There is no need for a publisher to fund a massive project; most of what is needed is already available on paper and increasing amounts of it have been scanned so that anyone with a laser printer can make their own permanent copy.

Of course those 1930s and 40s books won't tell you how to build a modern computer but they do tell you how to build a radio without needing to build a chip fab first.

And it seems that there is sufficient interest (presumably as conversation pieces) for some such books to be republished: https://bookshop.org/books/the-handyman-s-complete-self-inst...

Henry Stephens Book of the Farm from the 1800s can still be useful today, for example.

Sadly as radio goes the way of tv and switches to HD over time, I fear the analog equivalents that you can somewhat easily tune with a simple circuit may not still be around in 20, 30, 40 years.

100%. My half-kidding "end of the world/zombie apocalypse" plan was always to pile some food into Robarts Library (Toronto) and gather the books I'd need to make it.

1) Endless knowledge

2) It's a bloody fortress

Kidding aside, though, and also being one that maintains a small library I have to agree. Most of them are not so cheap as to actively degrade so fundamentally as to be unreadable. Maybe old dime-store dramas. I mean, unless you've left them open in the sunlight for 50 years.

Further to my remark about things being scanned take a look at this from 1909: Modern electrics ... v.1 no.10 1909 Jan. <https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015067294929&vi...>

> But for what? Most heirloom hardbacks are better-than-average novels for well-heeled fans and collectors, not a complete guide to rebuilding civilisation.

They're not a guide for rebuilding civilization. They're something that can last through whatever dark time you're considering in some semi-forgotten corner, so the next civilization can learn about and study what came before. And honestly, they don't need to last the whole time, but rather only until thins recover enough that you start to have copyists, etc.

We assume books are permanent because we've always had them. But in medieval times books weren't permanent. We only have the knowledge that we do now because monasteries had a dedicated team of monks who constantly copied and rewrote books onto new parchment.

True, good modern paper of the types those monk used lasts about 500 years or so in the typical case. (meaning no fire-flood, both of which were common; and not in a carefully climate controlled area which can add thousands of years). We haven't really improved on paper since then. There is a lot of cheap paper that will fall apart in less than 100 years, but those monks didn't use that.

What digital storage do you have that will last that long? A few CDs would in the ideal case (but most are not that grade). I'm not clear how long SSDs will last. Magnetic tape becomes brittle and single read in about 30 years as we know from history.

The only advantage of digital is IF you care at all it is easy/cheap to copy to something new.

It only seems like we’ve always had them because most people want books from this century. The further back you go the harder it is to find any type of book, even mass produced dime novels, because a lot of them have rotted away.

If you actually want books to last a long time, they must be stored under controlled conditions by an actual archivist.

Books (especially used ones) are also generally cheaper than digital copies.

Well, we're likely one strong magnetic pulse away from having only paper books as a source of information, so there is that.

Electromagnetic pulses can't wipe CDs or DVDs, so we'd definitely still have anything stored on those, and most data centres are designed with EM shielding so we could still have data stored in the cloud unless it was a massive pulse. I think we'd be OK.

CD’s and DVD’s require players which are susceptible to EM pulses. It seems extremely unlikely for that kind of global EM pulse to happen, but I can’t exactly say it’s impossible.

I'm no EM-pulsicist, but I believe an EM pulse capable of inducing destructive currents in conductors as relatively short as those you'd find in an (unplugged) CD/DVD player, and doing that all over the globe, such a pulse would have to be ridiculously, absurdly massive. Are there any events or things we know about that could do this without also, say, sterilizing the planet?

Coronal mass ejections can cause geomagnetic storms that will mess with electronics globally.

It happened back in 1859, but it's effects were limited as the only susceptible tech was telegraph systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event

On the other hand of all the books I'd like to save, the Ikea catalogue isn't top of the list.

I've been watching the series and haven't heard that quote. Might just have to read the books now.

I started with the series as well, after the previous season ended I became desperate to continue the story so I started reading them. They did such a good job with the series but the books were so good already.

You’re arguing with emotions but no objectivity.

Did you miss the memo where hordes of people drive their trucks to IKEA and buy furniture that’s designed to be affordable by the middle class, costs an enormous amount of energy to produce and recycle and has a huge carbon footprint?

But never mind those things, catalog is paper so it makes it easy to market your argument to tree huggers.

The gas consumption alone to drive to IKEA dwarfs the energy required to make and print catalogs.

Just don’t go to IKEA and next time they won’t print as many! Problem solved. And you’ll save gas too.

IKEA catalogs are culture. It’s like saying let’s close down the Louvre museum because it’s consuming too much energy and inviting people to travel to Paris wasting more energy.

I commented to get the thought process started.

The furniture and its procurement is only the next logical step in the conversation.

Thinking and talking about this stuff is how I myself went from buying Ikea furniture to no longer doing so.

I think that without having these kinds of conversations and perpetuating them we have little hope.

I’m with you. We should all strive to stop waste and do our part.

I don’t shop at IKEA for similar reasons and I have also cut down Amazon purchases for random things that I can do without.

I think I was being too harsh, but I am sad that the catalogs are going away. They’re such a big part of IKEA’s contribution to culture that it’s carbon footprint can be forgiven.

This may be the most demagogic HN comment I've read in years.

> 40 million copies of a thick catalog with glossy pages means a couple shittons of not just trees but petroleum and petrochemicals for production, distribution, and disposal. Every year!

- What about about daily printed newspapers?

- What about shop brochures that we receive weekly in the mailbox?

- What about toilet paper and derivates?

I can't understand people congratulating the discontinuation of an yearly book (arguably an historic document) instead of focusing one order of magnitude higher.

What about them?

Well, we won't get rid of them all at once... But don't you think it would be a good idea?

For what it's worth, I don't use toilet paper for its intended purpose, and I bet my butt is way cleaner than yours if you do. :)

I'm not sure why you are so critical of applauding one good thing just because other bad things are still in place.

How do you blow your nose?

The same way it's been done for millennia before, into a cloth or into my hand which I then wash.

It must be exhausting to be so much better than the rest of us.

I never understood the idea of privation being considered progressive. It isn’t progress to set the thermostat to a more uncomfortable temperature in order to save energy. It isn’t progress to have massive grid outages because windmills froze — windmills that are sitting atop many lifetimes of oil and natural gas reserves. It isn’t progress to freeze today because someone is theorizing that Tuvalu is on the cusp of sinking. Yet Tuvalu is growing in size instead of sinking but our policies still feature Chicken Little fear-mongering as a tool of control.

Sitting in a frozen-windmill-induced blackout in sub freezing temperatures for day two in Houston of all places makes me extremely irritated that the reason we have a blackout is because the hysterical anti-carbon crowd is afraid of a catastrophe that we’ve been promised since Al Gore’s inaccurate film. [1] A “catastrophe” being used in a similar vein as the war in Eastasia. Or was it Eurasia? Kind of hard to remember now given that new printed books are being replaced by digital because forgotmypw17 is worried about the carbon footprint of ink.

> ERCOT said Tuesday that of the 45,000 total megawatts of power that were offline statewide, about 30,000 consisted of thermal sources — gas, coal and nuclear plants — and 16,000 came from renewable sources.

- https://www.chron.com/news/article/Texas-blackouts-fuel-fals...

> In truth, virtually all forms of power generation in Texas suffered outages during the cold snap, with early reports showing gas plants sustaining the most failures, Webber said. Early Monday morning, ERCOT issued a news release saying generation “across fuel types” had gone offline, amid reports of wind turbines covered in ice and natural gas wellheads freezing up.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Tex...

This is just the first source I found on google to quote, but if houstonchronicle isn't a trustworthy news source let me know. It seems like all forms of energy suffered from a lack of winterization. To me, it seems the issue is not that renewable energy was depended upon, but rather that the whole system was unprepared for a cold snap like this.

> But the vast majority of energy the state generates is through natural gas. In October 2020, the U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that renewables generated 22% of the state's energy, while gas generated 51.8%.19 hours ago

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/are-frozen-wind-turbines-to-...

> It must be exhausting to be so much better than the rest of us.

I don't recall claiming such a thing. I'm sharing what I do and why, and if anyone wants to use my knowledge they're welcome to.

Sorry about the blackout, and any role I have inadvertently played in it.

No offense, there are many places around the world where blackouts are a regular everyday (or even every day) occurrence. Perhaps, you can give them a thought in an idle moment.

> It isn’t progress to have massive grid outages because windmills froze

How did Texans manage to screw up windmills? The ones across the lake from me work perfectly fine all winter long, despite much colder winters.

I'm guessing they cheaped out on basic preparedness measures for this sort of thing, and clearly across the whole grid, not just renewables.

I don't understand the reasoning behind defending someone who kills six people by mentioning three people who killed ten. Do you seriously think the person you've replied to is happy about daily printed newspapers, junkmail, and wasted toilet paper?

Not that person, but I do enjoy reading my newspaper from paper.

But I recently decided to switch to digital. The paper keeps piling up, and I increasingly find myself reading the news on their app.

I believe the fair proportion is 3 people that killed 100 people each running free while we congratulate the police for jailing the guy who insulted us.

At least in Norway we have stickers we can put on our mailboxes that makes it illegal to add mail spam to them.

Pretty simple solution, should be standard everywhere.

Shouldn’t we more worried about using toilet paper than IKEA catalog if we want to save trees ? Using a bidet is very easy and clean.

https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2010/04/16/toilet-paper-...

It's true, and a bidet proper isn't necessarily needed.

I haven't used an actual bidet in a while, but I honestly find it hard to fathom not washing my butt after pooping now that I've started doing it.

TP is just smearing it around...

Can you explain how you wash your butt afterwards? Do you take a shower? Sit in the sink and rinse with soap?

It depends on the circumstances. I may get into the shower or I may hang my butt over the tub or sink.

The basic method is to keep washing it and rinsing it off and then washing off my hand, until I no longer feel poop or anything resembling it on my butt. Be gentle. No soap on the butt, that will dry it out. (As I mentioned in other posts, I don't use soap anywhere besides my hands.)

I then keep washing it, occasionally washing off my hand. When I can rub my butt with my hand it comes back not smelling like poop at all, I consider my butt to be clean.

If you look at animals, they do something similar, though they have to lick it clean. I consider myself very fortunate and blessed to not have to do that. :)

Afterwards, I wash my hands, get dressed, and then wash my hands again.

Thanks. Definitely food for thought!

If you are just smearing it around then I think you have both a diet and a method problem.

Here is a challenge for you:

After you're done wiping as thoroughly as you will, run your hand or another piece of toilet paper through your butt and smell it.

Here is a challenge for you, get some dog crap on your hand and spray it with a garden house then sniff your hand. Unless you are soaping and scrubbing your ass deep, it isn't going to be 100% sanitary regardless of using paper or a bidet. They are nice, but in the end it doesn't matter.

If you try the dog crap experiment and actually make a good effort with the hose and scrub it, you will find that it does not smell anymore.

> These catalogs do not biodegrade well, by the way, because they're not just paper.

Great! A new carbon capture method that also provides utility! I’ll take 40M please.

I don't think you're saving any carbon emissions by printing IKEA catalogs...

1) What do you think IKEA furniture is made of?

2) What do you think the impact is of poorly constructed IKEA furniture that lasts some small fraction of time of massive wood furniture.

If you want to go off, then go off on the fact that our governments support the creation of throwaway products rather than long lasting products.

I agree on the Ikea furniture bit, and the impact it has. The catalog is only the beginning.

I can't do anything about what our governments support. I can do something about what I support and what I am complicit to.

> sent to the landfill to rot.

What if we call it "carbon sequestration" instead? :)

How would you like a job at Greenwashing Incorporated?

You can start on Monday!

> Can you even imagine a stack of one million catalogs?

The stack would reach from earth to ISS multiple times.

Tell that to Restoration Hardware (RH).

But browsing the web for it is just not the same.

You need a fast internet connection. And a fast computer. Even your older iPhone probably can’t handle the online catalog anymore. After a few pages, you just give up.

But with a paper catalog, you can put it down. Circle it. Fold it. Rip pages out. Write on it. Then discard it. You can rifle through the pages, and dream of how you want your home to be laid out.

It is too bad they designed it poorly. I regularly test my sites with older devices and ensure even a 25yo PC can access it. It,s not that difficult, just a bit tedious.

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