Dead trees, grenades and greenwash

Greetings from dead tree media, as the magazine industry is affectionately known among self-righteous eco-warriors in cyberspace. 

For the record, as a magazine editor I do not spend my lunchtimes ripping bark from nearby trees just to watch them die. 

It’s not that I’m blasé about the environment. One of the marvels of modern life is our ability to produce a soft-drink can, which, when discarded, will last forever and a cheap automobile, which, when properly looked after, will start to rust after five years. 

I noticed in the Economist that “computers, printers, mobile phones and the widgets that accompany them” account for 2% of carbon-dioxide emissions caused by human activity. Which makes IT as big an environmental villain as aviation. A quarter of these emissions come from the manufacture of computers, phones and accompanying widgets, the rest is produced by their use.

It is a legendary internet fact that the average avatar in Second Life uses almost as much electricity per year as the average Brazilian. By ‘internet fact’ I mean this statistic has been published triumphantly in cyberspace and since vehemently and credibly disputed.   

The avatar controversy exposes a kind of greenwash we all engage in. Companies spin their eco-credentials and it is often absurdly obvious – can a hand grenade that emits less smoke really save the world? – but we’re all guilty.

While many of us are saving the world one green lightbulb at a time, we excuse our favourite gadgets from the same ruthless scrutiny. My only surprise at the Economist report was that “computers, phones and accompanying widgets” didn’t account for more emissions.

Electronic technology is usually adopted in three stages. Early users blaze the trail. Then comes a tipping point where failure to use the aforesaid technology identifies you as a social misfit. And finally, when the technology is universal, we anxiously strive to ensure we own the very latest incarnation and that this technology is in a constant state of readiness. At this point, as Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic says, “If our mobile phone is more than six months old we feel as embarrassed as if we had a nasty skin rash”.

As Jerry Seinfeld once observed, we have gone crazy with the phones. It says something about the perverse resilience of the human spirit that, during the worst recession in 70 years, the most catastrophic fate many of us can imagine is being stranded, in public, with an uncharged phone. Phone makers accentuate this anxiety with the strip that tells us how much juice we have left on our phones – it seems to have only four settings: full, 90%, 10% and “your battery is low”.

Just over a hundred years ago, adventurous souls thought nothing of setting off to explore the uncharted depths of the Amazon. Now the mere prospect of a phoneless hour or two fills many of us with such deep, existential dread that we leave our phones overcharging overnight, pointlessly emitting – in Britain alone – about 85,000 tonnes of CO2. And it’s not just the phones. The charging of laptops, iPods and accompanying widgets is endemic. 

In an ideal, slightly fanciful world we could recharge our widgets by harnessing the energy generated by hamsters as they pound their wheels. Sadly, New Scientist readers crunched the numbers and found it could take 100,000 hamsters to power a typical British household for a year and an army of animal behaviourists to devise the fiendish, Pavlovian tricks required to keep the rodents running.

We can talk about green charging, eco-batteries and the like, but we will all – even those who don’t work in dead-tree media – urgently need to consider how we reconcile our reliance on the latest technology with the need to fight climate change. 

If we don’t, the consequences of our technophilia will be far more devastating than sore thumbs from Blackberry abuse.