One of my more favourite books of the last year is "How Bad Are Bananas?" by Mike Berners-Lee. It is sub-titled "The carbon footprint of everything."
I actually loaned my first copy to a friend and never got it back, so I am working on my second copy. I guess, in terms of a carbon footprint, purchasing a second copy could be viewed as both a good thing and a bad thing.
Good because more than one person is reading the book. Bad because I have now purchased two copies of the same physical book requiring twice the resources.
This is one of the central points of "How Bad Are Bananas?" Determining the carbon footprint of things is difficult and often convoluted. For example, the more people that read a singular copy of a book, the more one could say that its carbon footprint has been decreased. But has it? Or is the same footprint just spread out over more consumers?
That is, the amount of energy and resources to produce each copy of the book stays the same regardless of the number of people that read it. But the per capita footprint declines with each new reader.
And if we are going to measure the carbon footprint of a book, where do we stop? With the actual paper and ink? Or do we include the time spent by the author in putting the book together? The time spent by the publisher producing the final copy? The embedded carbon in each bookstore that sells it?
Determining a carbon footprint is not easy.
This is what I enjoyed about "How Bad Are Bananas?" Right up front, Mike Berners-Lee admits that it is pretty much impossible to determine the carbon footprint of anything in isolation. Determining where to draw the boundary is difficult.
There is a huge gap between what the consumer needs to know to make an informed decision and the information that is presently available.
So "How Bad Are Bananas?" doesn't try to give definitive answers. Instead, it tries to give people a ballpark figure - a sort of relative scale of carbon footprints similar to the scale that we have for many things in our lives.
For example, if we were to look at a Rolls Royce and a Toyota, we would expect the Rolls Royce to cost more. Or a bottle of Dom Prignon to be more expensive than an ordinary bottle of white wine.
We have a sense of relative scale even though we might not know the exact price.
Mike Berners-Lee provides a similar sense of scale for the carbon footprint of items that we use on a daily basis. Or, at least, ones that are familiar to our everyday lives based on carbon dioxide equivalents.
At the low end is a text message coming in at 0.014 grams. The biggest part of a text message's footprint resides in the electricity involved in your phone. At this level of carbon consumption, one could view text messages as insignificant.
But consider that some 2.5 trillion text messages are sent every year and the number is growing. That results in a 32,000-ton footprint in total which sounds like a big number but isn't really. Still, is it 32,000-tons of carbon that needs to be emitted? Are text messages really that important?
A web search has slightly higher carbon demands. An efficient laptop might require 0.7 grams but a more power hungry machine might push the number to 4.5 grams. It also depends on the complexity of the search and how many answers are returned and how many you actually look at and for how long.
Still, it provides a benchmark for using a computer to search for information. It also provides a comparison to a piece of paper which might have the same information. A typical sheet of paper has a carbon footprint of 10 grams.
Of course, printing the results of your search can seriously add to the carbon footprint - at the rate of 10 grams per sheet of paper printed.
But what about reading the whole thing online? I must confess that I hate reading long articles online. I much prefer the tactile experience of a sheet of paper. Is reading online always more carbon friendly, though?
For a single sheet, the answer would appear to be "yes". But for a thicker document and a longer reading time, the two methods start to balance out. A typical computer might have an embedded carbon footprint of 700 kg which combined with its electrical consumption lead to a carbon footprint on the order of 150 grams per hour.
In this regard, printing 15 pages of text and reading it offline is comparable to spending an hour online to read it. And the best part is that the pages can be shared without any further carbon footprint.
