Are dead-tree magazines good or bad for the climate?

Companies are increasingly being asked to calculate their carbon footprint, and if they're public, publish it. Good idea? Perhaps. But it's harder than you might think, and the results can sometimes be counterintuitive. Take my own industry, magazine publishing. Surely dead-tree media is bad for the climate, and web media is good, right? Well, not necessarily.

Let's look at the total carbon cycle. The thing we're trying to do when combating climate change is to decrease the amount of carbon in the atmosphere (ie, have a net carbon-negative process). This is what happens with magazine publishing:

1. Trees take carbon out the air. Carbon negative
2. Sustainable forestry companies (the only kind we use) cut down those trees, and plant an equal number to replace them (trees absorb the most carbon in the young, high-growth period of their life. Update: see comments for more on this). Carbon neutral
3. The cut trees are turned into pulp and then paper in a decarbonized process. Mills are generally on rivers and the pulp process is driven by hydro-generated electric power. Additional power is generated by burning bark, and the carbon from that is usually captured and sequestered. Carbon neutral
4. We print and bind that paper into magazines, which are delivered mostly by the US Postal Service, which runs the same routes whether they're carrying our magazines or not. Since the printing plants tend to be away from urban areas and near rail distribution, they tend to be pretty efficient from an energy perspective.  Slight carbon positive
5. Subscribers read (relish!) the magazines, and then throw them out. Since our readers tend to be upper middle-class urban and suburban dwellers, they're almost certainly either recycling the paper or it's being properly landfilled. In either case, the carbon is sequestered, which is to say it doesn't get back in the atmosphere. Carbon neutral

Now compare that with our website. The carbon cost of creating content is the same as the magazine (people in a building with computers and lights on), and the carbon cost of running our webservers 24/7, plus the carbon cost of more than 100 million minutes of time a month on all of the computers used to read those pages, along with their share of the Internet infrastructure in-between, is at least as much as the cost of running the magazine's printing plants once a month. But the big difference is that we lose step #1 above: although it generates no more or less carbon than magazine publishing, web publishing takes no carbon out of the atmosphere.

So by this analysis dead-tree magazines have a smaller net carbon footprint than web media. We cut down trees and put them in the ground. From a climate change perspective, this is a good thing.

And what about magazines printed on recycled paper? Well, putting aside the inconvenient truth that there isn't enough recycled paper to go around and that it's ruinously expensive for large-circulation titles such as ours, it has the same problem as the website. It doesn't take any new carbon out of the atmosphere--there's no net sequestration.

Now if you'd asked me to actually put a number in front of each of these directional arrows--say how much better print is than the web from a carbon perspective--I couldn't do it. It involves too many third parties, from our printing presses to the recycling or landfilling practices of all of our subscribers. But I think the basic conclusion about which is most climate-friendly is right. Surprised?

[UPDATE: Joost in the comments points us to this excellent paper from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, which puts hard numbers on much of the above. It compared printed newspapers to people reading those newspapers on the web, and concluded that for the same time reading (30 minutes) the printed newspaper has a lower carbon footprint. Our magazine scenerio is even more favorable than that, since in the Swedish report they assumed that the paper would all be recycled (ie, they don't capture new carbon, the way we do with virgin pulp) and since they're newspapers, they have to do their own daily distribution at significant carbon cost, while we ride along with normal postal delivery.]

Comments

[nanek]

I don't see how trees taking carbon out of the air should be part of the life cycle you are mentioning here. Are you saying without magazine publishing trees will not take carbon out of the air or that there would be no trees? This post doesn't make any sense. Web publishing has a much lower footprint on the environment than print does.

[Chris Anderson]

C'mon Nanek, you can do better than that. The sustainable forestry industry (ie, the feedstock to the magazine industry) sequesters carbon from existing trees (by feeding them into a process that takes the carbon out of circulation) and plants new ones. The net effect is that magazine industry prompts more trees to be planted.

Please respond after you've had a chance to think it through.

[Skarl]

Actually, hydro-power is not carbon neutral. In some cases, it produces more pollution than oil-burning power plants. It also produces considerable methane:

http://www.energybulletin.net/4500.html

[Chris Anderson]

Skarl:

Sigh. In the calculus of traditional carbon accounting, hydro is considered netural. Please try to stay with the context here, which is carbon math as it is currently practiced. Nobody knows what the real effect is for each dam and each bioload in each river, so links like the one you sent are not helpful in a broad macro calculation like we're doing here.

[Geoff]

Given that world newsprint production is, apparently, of the order 38 million tons a year. It seem's to be neglecting the carbon cost of the tree extraction process from the forest to the pulping plant and the cost of transporting the paper reels to the printing press's plus the energy required to produce the ink and in the case of glossies the environmental cost of china clay production plus "International Paper uses herbicides on about two percent of our lands annually to increase fiber yield and we apply fertilizers on a site-specific basis to less than five percent of our lands annually to stimulate forest productivity". It is also not clear to me why young trees absorb carbon faster - surely it must be a function of leaf area?

[Naveen]

After thinking this through some, it appears that the essential difference is:
* Magazine - converts the tree into paper, which is either recycled or landfilled. Replaces the tree with another fresh tree.
* Website - lets the tree be where it is.

I could dissect the whole post and explain exactly how this is, but this is the essential difference as I see it.

This then becomes a question of whether the magazines are properly recycled or landfilled, and what percentage of them are. To the extent that they AREN'T recycled/landfilled properly, they DO contribute to the carbon footprint.

[Eric]

Are young trees more effective than older trees at absorbing carbon even when we account for the fact the a new tree is tiny compared to a mature tree?

[Chris Anderson]

Eric,

The age of the tree doesn't affect my calculation above (the age point was just an aside, although it does help the case for new-growth forests as carbon sinks), but the answer to your question is that there is a carbon absorbtion curve that peaks somewhere after the first decade of a tree's life, although the specific age varies from species to species and region to region. Older trees absorb carbon slower, but they're bigger. Younger trees absorb carbon faster (more new growth) but they're smaller.

The peak of that curve is between 10 and 70 years, depending on the species. See this for more: http://ask.metafilter.com/42874/Cant-see-the-forest-for-the-carbon-absorption-rates.

[Kevin]

I would be totally in agreement with Chris' were the title of his post "Are dead tree magazines actually carbon negative?". By bringing climate into the title he complicates the issue. Consider that fossil fuels are nothing more than nature's landfills plus time plus pressure. From a "carbon footprint" point of view modern landfills that inhibit decay are actually a good thing. They take carbon and "lock it up". Magazines that end up in a landfill are actually carbon negative. In a way our current landfills are taking the place of the fossil fuels we take from nature's landfills.

[Gary]

Chris,

It seems as if the result you got is based on the assumption that the Post Office would be traveling the same routes using the same transportation methods as they do today whether or not there was print media to carry. It discounts the distributors' role in getting magazines to the stands, an so on.

You'd have to show me numbers behind these two assumptions to make this believable. Also, since the class of postage requires a large percentage of the magazine to be advertisements, doesn't that basically mean that 2/3 of the trees killed are killed to print magazines are killed for ads? Thinking about this in the same way you are, no matter how many ads are served, the cost to serve them is the same as the web sites that deliver them. So how could this not be cheaper?

[Chris Anderson]

Gary,

I think you're missing the point. It's not about "cheaper", it's about total carbon taken out of the system. The more trees we cut down and (eventually) bury in landfill, the better. So a print ad is "better" from a carbon perspective than a web ad, because it fells more trees and thus sequesters more carbon.

As for what fraction of the Post Office's carbon footprint we're responsible for, I can't answer that. But I made some very conservative estimates above, letting the once-a-month carbon cost of printing and mailing equal the carbon cost of serving something on the order of 60 million pages views a month on the website, running 7/24. So I think that whatever you want to "charge" the magazine for the Post Office's vans, it's still doing better than our server farms from a carbon perspective.

[Joost]

The conclusions that you draw seem to be in line with a thorough and scientific work from the Centre for Sustainable Communications of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. In their report "Screening environmental life cycle assessment of printed, web based and tablet e-paper newspaper" they found that for dead-tree newspapers the paper had the most impact, for e-readers the manufacturing and for web reading the energy consumption. But paper newspapers still beat the rest. (Using google on the title you can find the full report).

[James]

There are several problems with the statements above. The first one is that we really do not know how much "co2 equivalents" the forests are absorbing. We know how much carbon a tree has, but then working out the amount a forest actually absorbs is a different question. Many of the calculations used for working out the footprint of a forest are quite dubious.

If we plant a so called "sustainable" forest of pines, or eucalypts they will push out native fauna and flora. The decay of the native flora and flora will add to the co2 footprint. Plantations of pines, and eucalypts greatly increase the fire risk. You also have count all the thinning of trees that takes place for the maintenance of the forest.

It also takes of energy to produce paper, you can not claim that because the paper is made with hydro that it is carbon neutral as the hydro power could be used for reducing the the need for coal or gas fired plants elsewhere.

On the release side a magazine will take about a year to compost and release co2 back into the environment. A tree will take many years to then absorb the carbon back.

[Eric Dewhirst]

Great news!

Hmmm just some questions:
1) How do the tress get harvested (mmm machinery)
2) How do the trees get to the mill? (mmm truck)
3) How does the paper get to your printers? (mmm truck)
4) How much CO2 is emitted in the creation of the inks for the magazine?
5) How do they get from this super efficient train to the various postal outlets, and magazine shops? (mmm truck)
6) How much cost is it for the garbage trucks to haul the magazines to the dump?
7) Can magazines be recycled - ahh nahh too much ink - darn - landfill them - oooops landfills create methane - hmmm methane is worse than CO2

And some big ones - "and the carbon cost of running our webservers 24/7 is roughly equivalent to (if not higher than) the cost of running the magazine's printing plants once a month." Based on what? Have you been to your printing plant? Do you have a clue on how much energy it takes to make your magazine within a printing facility? Also how big is you server farm? Server "Farm" sounds huge but I doubt it is more than 10 3U servers that serves up your static content and if you say it is more you are a stranger to the truth.

Your website takes no carbon out? Come again? You are right kinda like when I choose to ride my bike to work I don't take any carbon out but then again I don't release as much CO2 as I would if I drove to work.

Now I can take some pie in the sky flippant CO2 reduction math and round things favorably and say it all balances out to being equal in macroeconomic terms - but it is not equal and you know it is not. I am not sure what your post was about but if you are getting into the debunking climate change business keep that happy smiley easy peasy CO2 cost calculating up and I am sure you can get a lot of favorable funding from The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition.

No I think the bottom line is Printed Magazines are more lucrative - advertisers have to pay upfront and even if people don't look at the ads the publisher gets paid. Online CPM rates suck and everything is going CPC and if you are engaging people then they don't want to leave to go to an advert.

To be blunt - it is painful to read your post and the fanboys who prop you up - we live in the land of mis-information for the purposes of delaying change to reduce CO2 emissions and you Chris are now on the wrong side of the ledger. Play tricks with your words, intimidate those that comment, but your message in this post is clearly: Are Magazines really that bad for CO2 reduction? hmmmm? leave people with doubt, provide one side of the story that supports your argument and leave the necessary dirty details out. You are not cutting down the trees and burying them as they fall - you are processing, transporting, manufacturing and printing, transporting them again and in that entire process you require vast amounts of energy which produce CO2 emissions to achieve your goal of having your people read your articles.

It is fair to say there are un-calculated costs of publishing online and it is not carbon neutral - I agree - but that is not at the core of what you were saying in your post - your former colleagues at Nature and Science would shake their head and wonder as I do why you have strayed.

Flame away!

Cheers - Eric

[Chad]

You write that "Additional power is generated by burning bark, and the carbon from that is usually captured and sequestered."

This is simply untrue. Carbon sequestration is a long-term goal, but it currently exists nowhere other than a handful of early-phase pilot projects designed to test the idea.

The entire post, devoid as it is of numbers or empirical findings of any kind, is nothing but creative story-telling and totally unpersuasive. But it is whopper about carbon sequestration that demonstrates conclusively that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

[Henri Weijo]

"Sustainable forestry companies (the only kind we use) cut down those trees, and plant an equal number to replace them (trees absorb the most carbon in the young, high-growth period of their life. Update: see comments for more on this). Carbon neutral"

Sorry if someone has posted this already, but here goes. I see point #2 as being Carbon negative. If the trees are NOT cut down, they will release all that carbon they've inhaled back into the atmosphere. So cutting down trees and using them in, say, housing is very carbon friendly - especially if you plant new trees in their place!

[Shane]

I'm not sure if you can really negate the impact of shipping by saying that they are taking routes they take already, but include the use of the millions of computer minutes used to read the articles, along with the running of the infrastructure, which are certainly on regardless of which website the user is viewing.

[Chris Anderson]

Shane,

I didn't discount our share of the postal carbon cost entirely (I put that line item as a carbon positive), I just said that the whole process was net no more (and probably a lot less) than the net carbon cost of reading online. The Swedish study I linked to confirms this.

[Chris Anderson]

Chad,

The simple answer is that it depends on the paper mill. Since the 90s, the mills have been leaders in regeneration and effluent capture because they've been under so much environmental pressure. Some sequester and some don't (see this for more: http://www.springerlink.com/content/7817j51161u1r022/)

The mills we use change from time to time based on price and availability, so it's very difficult to do a perfect carbon accounting at any one time. But the rising cost of oil has made European (mostly Finnish) paper uneconomic in the US (it has to be shipped across the ocean), so we're mostly using Canadian paper, which tends to be more hydro-powered and thus more carbon neutral.

James,

It's not true that hydro power could be used equally elsewhere so I shouldn't count it. Transmission losses favor uses close to the point of generation, and paper mills, being right on the river, are among the most efficient users of hydro power.

[Chad]

Chris,

Thanks for the link about carbon capture and storage (CCS).

However, the paper is about _SIMULATIONS_ of CCS. - not actually operating CCS. There is a diference.

Carbon capture and storage is the 'holy grail' of combating climate change. Geologists don't know if it will ultimately work and the technology to capture CO2 is, at the moment, prohibitively expensive.

[Gary Frost]

What if the comparative energy accounting is based on a per -read unit over time? Remember that paper publications can be reaccessed for centuries. If you discount the housing overhead common to both servers and print books, a lower energy is allocated to sustained reading in print as compared with sustained reading on screen, especially as projected in centuries.

[jax]

wow , displaying your creativity , eh ?

what exactly is carbon sequestered ? every piece of tree/paper that makes it to the landfill is eventually decomposed and the carbon is returned back into the atmosphere. So it most definitely is not neutral . If the tree were left to live however......

Why do you just not use solar energy or somesuch to power your servers and be done with it ?

Jax .

[Chris Anderson]

Jax,

I think you need to research modern landfill methods a bit more. There's no reason why today's landfills won't do pretty much what the plant material of a million years ago did--end up deep underground and turn back into fossil fuels. Of course by then we (if we're still around) sure won't be using fossil fuels anymore.

Chris

[John Carnegie]

I'm pleased to see the number of comments that have been generated by this blog post so far.

Our friendly neighborhood nuclear fusion generator (just a short powerwalk of 93 million miles away) delivers over 180,000 Terawatts per day to our little carbon-based biosphere. Our daily use of oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, hydro, and other energy sources at the loooong end of the energy tail (solar, wind, etc.) adds up to almost 20 Terawatts per day.

180,000 - 20 = 179,980 of underutilized energy potential every day. Are there other cost-effective ways to use more of that underutilized energy potential, without contributing more problems than solutions? Will we have to sell our children into slavery to purchase the technology to make this happen? The simple answer is 'No.'

A portion of this energy source, combined with carbon dioxide and water, gets converted into carbohydrates (sugars and starches) by plants and trees (photosynthesis). This is the ultimate carbon sequestration system that existed on this planet for a long time.

No need for multi-billion dollar theoretical research and development of multi-trillion dollar technology deployment schemes to cool down our fevered planet - let's return to simple science originally discovered by our ancestors resulting from them observing the decomposition of organic matter.

* Sugars and starches and yeast and water and heat...what are some of the ultimate outcomes that result from mixing these ingredients in specific measurements and sequences?

* Would you be surprised to learn that most of the original automobiles and internal combustion engines produced in the 1800's ran on this fuel?

* Do you know that most gasoline powered automobiles can run on 50% of this fuel right now, even though our present fuel blends only use 5% to 10% of this fuel source?

* Did you know that 99% of all of this fuel produced in the United States is presently purchased by the very same industry that spends tens of millions of dollars spouting propaganda that if we attempt to produce more of this fuel, millions of people will die of starvation because the cost of food will skyrocket?

* Did you know that the clippings from the largest nonagricultural 'crop'- that we pay people to cut and dispose of - could be used to produce about 1/3 of this fuel source?

* Did you know that the Dead Zone (over 22,000 square mile body of water around the Mississippi Delta and Gulf of Mexico) could be used to generate this fuel to power all of our vehicles, power plants, home heating and cooling systems, etc.?

And that's only a fraction of the existing potential delivered every day by our local nuclear fusion generator...

I sent Chris an email via Wired.com on a subject that may help us all reduce our carbon footprint dramatically, whether we choose to consume pulp-based or electrically powered editorial. I look forward to his future post on the subject, and I will refrain from referencing it here prior to his due diligence efforts.

Let's all do our best to make 2008 a more intelligent year regarding carbon footprints and renewable energy sources.

Best regards,

John Andrew Carnegie

[jax]

Chris ,

Maybe you can highlight the ways the landfills are maintained and powered .

Most of the publications point to the complications and the ruinous long term impact of landfills and even presently landfill maintenance is becoming a issue of concern .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill#Impacts
http://loma.civil.duth.gr/

Are you sure you are just not passing the buck ? Try to factor in the footprint of the complete cycle.....

Jax.