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

Chris's article has brought up a very interesting and important question - how much carbon do we really emit? It is a question which every person and every company should should attempt to answer. Not only is the public demanding environmental accountability, but it makes practical business sense to track and measure your carbon emissions. As the saying goes, "you can't manage what you can't measure."

I commend Chris for attempting to analyze his company's carbon footprint. Although, calculating a carbon footprint is not the easiest of tasks, especially when it comes to large companies with big supply chains. There is no way of guessing a carbon footprint unless you look at the numbers.

It is possible that the printed version of the magazine has a lower carbon footprint than the web version. If Chris is interested in really finding this out, I would like to offer our company's services to Wired Magazine. Our company, Environmental Performance Group, based out of Salt Lake City, specializes in Carbon and Ecological Footprinting. We would love the opportunity to help Wired determine which publishing method has less of an environmental impact.

The point of Chris's article is that printed materials sequester carbon, but more importantly, I think we need to consider the total ecological footprint. This goes beyond carbon emissions to see how much land is required to produce and distribute the magazine. Carbon emissions are certainly important, especially if any sort of cap & trade program begin. But ecological footprints are a way of measuring a company's sustainability. This would be an incredibly interesting exercise for us and a way for Wired to show it's dedication to their readers and the environment. (Not to mention it is a way to reduce their bottom line through efficiency upgrades and a myriad of other business benefits.)

If Chris or any other person from Wired is interested, please contact us. Let's settle this debate with real numbers rather than guesses.

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[Brian Schmidt]

I'll just note that Chris has not answered Chad's comment, that carbon produced from biomass burning in paper plants is NOT sequestered, and that the link Chris provided discusses sequestration simulations, not actual practice.

And since Chris relies on "calculus of traditional carbon accounting," he should be aware that traditional proposals for carbon sequestration do not rely on temporary and leaky landfills as an appropriate place to do sequestration. He should calculate leakage rates if he wants to use that method.

[amazingdrx]

It maybe time for a replacement editor-in-chief, if this is the level of your understanding on these GHG issues. My resume on my blog, with a brief expose of the simplistic flaws in this GHG analysis.

Presented for management consideration, I can telecommute.

[Will]

ForestEthics Executive Directore Todd Paglia takes this very post to task in an op-ed on Vanity Fair and other magazines which publish "green" issues.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/todd-paglia/no-more-green-issues-plea_b_97205.html

Paglia also has a longer rebuttal to this post on the ForestEthics website:

http://forestethics.org//article.php?id=2125

[kabin]

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Kabin
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[jeux ds]

What's funny is that I heard someone argue not too long ago that trash-to-energy plants were "carbon neutral" for not totally dissimilar reasons. They basically blamed the carbon footprint on the producers of the goods while saying that they were neutral.

It's just a lot of buck-passing wankery. "Carbon neutral" is rapidly being redefined into meaninglessness, since there's no universally accepted way of measuring it. It's pretty easy to push your 'carbon footprint' off on somebody else in the chain, or say that it's a sunk cost that would occur with or without you and thus isn't your fault, etc. etc.

By Wired's definition, the landfills ought to be making a fortune by selling carbon-offset credits for all the "sequestering" they're doing. That's exactly what we need -- more dumps!