To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
– William Blake
I got into a conversation with a friend the other day about a seemingly simple question that perfectly encapsulates what I call “the measurement challenge” that cuts across energy and environmental topics. The question: Which is “greener”, distributing documents at a meeting in paper form, or as PDF files on a USB drive?
I bet a lot of you just knee-jerked and said it was the USB drive, because paper is Very Very Bad.
Well, not so fast. Before casting your vote for one option or the other, this deserves a bit of thought.
For one thing, how many pages of paper are we talking about? One? A thousand? One hundred thousand? It’s not hard to imagine the lines on a graph crossing at a point of equal environmental cost–below X pages, paper has a lower overall impact, above that page count and the USB drive wins.
Next is the question of what we mean by printing. Are we talking about using 20-pound, 100% recycled white paper with a laser printer (or inkjet, whichever has the lowest impact), or are we printing 28-pound, brilliant white, non-recycled paper on whichever technology does the most environmental harm? I suspect that these details could shift X, our number of pages trade off point, to the left or right on our line graph considerably.
And the fun doesn’t stop there, of course. Are going to use a standard, off the shelf USB drive, or one that’s (apparently) much greener? How much does that do to our X point?
Speaking of fun, what do we mean by environmental impact, anyway? How do we measure things like energy use, CO2 emissions (both direct and indirect), water use (both draw and consumption, two different issues), various other pollutants, like heavy metals, the ease of recycling the paper or USB drive, etc. and combine them into a single number so we can say this solution’s impact is better than that solution’s? Or do we simplify our lives by picking one big goal–fighting climate chaos–and then focus exclusively on greenhouse gas emissions and simply ignore the other measurements we could be making and considering? In the case of a USB drive vs. paper that becomes all the more pertinent, given the waste water issues associated with creating paper.
I’ve heard this particular question of paper vs. USB for document distribution to groups from a few dozen to a few hundred people come up several times recently, and I have to admit that I don’t know the answer. It would take quite a determined effort to find out the impact of those two options, even without throwing recordable CDs into the mix as a third possibility, and even then you’d likely have the ground for yet another debate when you try to weigh some costs against others, as I mentioned above.
(This is a general concept that’s very familiar to economists. Look up utility maximization in an advanced microeconomics textbook, and you’ll be surprised at the level of math the “on the other hand” guys use in analyzing this decision making process.)
So, OK, it’s a tough problem. What’s the point? Simply this: We’re awash in these kinds of decisions, which if made in accordance with our goals, could represent a very significant reduction in the environmental impact of many of our daily activities. Many of these decisions, like the USB vs. paper one, are overt purchasing issues which require you to decide between buying one widget or another. But others are much more subtle, such as whether you drive like the typical US driver (i.e. leadfoot) or you employ some mild hypermiling techniques to burn less gasoline and money and emit less CO2 on your way from point A to point B. Or perhaps once you think about the actual numbers involved, you’ll realize you can avoid some of those trips from A to B entirely.
This all relates to the basic mission of this site, to help educate and activate consumers and voters, so they can make more informed and better decisions that help themselves and the rest of us, in both the short and longer terms. Turning from that ideal to the real world, how far can we go without solid data on which to base our decisions, and what will it take to get much more and much better data for those of us who are willing to look at it and make those more informed decisions?
How about distributing a link to the documents on-line?
How long do you have to stare at a monitor to generate as much carbon as printing a page? (yeah, yeah maybe thats hitting a little close to home??)
To answer any of these questions one needs to define basic standards and reference up or down (for specific questions) from those standards.
I didn’t mention the online-only option because those weren’t considered viable in the cases I encountered. In one of those I think the people running the gathering were wrong and could have set up a web site or docs on a file sharing site, but they wanted to hand out something at the event.
This reminds me of the grocery bag question. It’s neither paper nor plastic, but buying those 99 cent, reusable bags they sell at the store, which will last years.
Again, it comes back to how we make our decisions. If we’re more open to relatively minor changes, we often have a lot more options than most people see at first glance, and some of those can yield the biggest savings in money, energy, and CO2.