Brian Palmer writing for The Green Lantern – a weekly environmental column in the Washington Post – claims that Kindles and iPads are better for the environment than books. The article (flagged by our friend Luke Nicholson from More Associates) is a good example of competitive greenwash – using selective, industry-produced carbon statistics to trash an established technology in favour of a new, more profitable one.

Palmer uses estimates of the carbon cost of producing e-readers to say that, compared with books, they ‘pay for themselves’ at between the 18th and 23rd read (of an average text by an average reader). The figures exclude the carbon costs of building and running e-bookstore’s servers and the power to operate the hardware, as well as the cost of safe decommissioning and disposal. Palmer doesn’t say what metrics he’s using for the carbon cost of a book, but reading between the lines it’s assumed that paper is made from 100% virgin fibre and the inks used to print it mineral oil based, with high levels of volatile and toxic organic compounds. The comparison also seems to assume books are only read once.

We won’t waste any more time on ‘piece of string’ carbon comparisons. The question is: who benefits from this genre of pseudo-scientific analysis? The paper industry is as guilty of greenwash as any – just have a look at the mixture of truth and damned statistics deployed by Two Sides, the European papermakers’ campaign, to bolster their green credentials. On the other side of the argument, Mandy Haggith, author of Paper Trails: from Trees to Trash – the True Cost of Paper (reviewed here) - has said she thinks paper and print have the potential to become sustainable sooner than any other commodity manufacturing industry. Well-managed, farmed timber for papermaking is a sustainable resource – although Europe and the US still need to halve their consumption of paper and double their recycling rates (paper can be recycled up to 9 times). When will the electronics industry desist from mining non-renewables like lithium and columbite-tantalite, or stop building server farms that consume the power of medium-sized cities? 

Calverts halved the volume of paper it processed in 10 years. All the paper we now buy on our clients’ behalf is made from post-consumer recycled, Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified and other controlled sources of wood pulp. We use Bio vegetable oil based inks, and power our operations using 100% renewable energy. How did we do this without putting ourselves out of a job? By working with clients to design and print smarter and better – shorter print runs, more carefully targeted (no junk print), higher value and lower volume, more efficient use of industrial capacity. It’s not rocket science. We don’t even claim to be the greenest printers in the world.

Anti-print pundits only use the inane phrase ‘dead trees’ when they’re talking about paper. Would they talk about ‘dead flowers’ to talk about cotton, or ‘dead tubers’ to talk about root vegetables? Just as silly is the argument that e-communication is just ‘pushing electrons’, whereas making paper from trees is ‘moving carbon atoms around’ and therefore self-evidently bad. What’s really being revealed is a self-serving fetishisation of new products. This kind of stuff suits electronics manufacturers and gadget-obsessed media pundits alike.

When it comes to visual and graphic designers, the denigration of paper-based reading coincides with the decline of typographic knowledge in both the design schools and agencies. Many young designers seem terrified of the prospect of having to work in a medium as revealing and demanding as print. Correcting a mistake or hiding a design booboo in a print job is more complicated than tweaking a web page. Perhaps what they’re really frightened of is revealing a lack of knowledge in a medium that tends to stick around.

Another thought: print phobia doesn’t seem to apply to just-obsolete or craft based techniques like letterpress, which are enjoying a niche renaissance. There’s snobbery involved – something to do with white vs. blue collar, craft vs. graft, and the vain struggle against the proletarianisation of designers.

Perhaps the creative industries neophytes of 2020, when digital print has achieved hegemony, will be indulging in nostalgia about the sheer sensuality of litho, while buying clapped-out Heidelbergs to put in their basements and salivating online over their latest resource-hungry, slave labour manufactured gizmos. We hope not.