Amazon’s Kindle debuted in 2007. It was expensive and pretty ugly. Today, after more than a decade of development, the Kindle is an affordable and high-quality product, but I’ve always had a lingering question: Is the Kindle an environmentally sound option? In this week’s piece, I will investigate what it means to be environmentally sound, and estimate under what parameters a Kindle can be a green choice for a consumer.
First, what do I mean by environmentally sound? By that I mean, is the carbon footprint of the Kindle’s production and ongoing charging needs greater than or less than that of the production of new books purchased? For the first calculation, so as not to deal with distributed carbon costs, I will be placing the full value of a book’s carbon footprint on its original owner; second-hand and library books have a carbon footprint of zero.
For a simplistic calculation, we need a few numbers. How many books on average do Americans read per year? According to the Pew Research Center, it’s 12. How much carbon is released per physical book produced? Cleantech estimates seven-and-a-half kilograms. And how much carbon is produced in production of a Kindle? Amazon doesn’t disclose its production data, but independent research puts the production footprint at 290 kilograms of carbon dioxide. Assuming a five-year lifespan for a particular Kindle, charging costs would be about 20 kilograms more, putting the grand total at 310 kilograms.
At this point the math is easy: over its five-year lifetime, one Kindle has an equivalent footprint to 41 books. That’s just over eight books per year, lower than the American average of 12. So buying a Kindle makes sense if the consumer would otherwise buy eight brand-new books or more each year.
But this isn’t realistic. Consumers often borrow books from libraries or friends and purchase second-hand books. If a person never purchases a new book, then even considering distributed carbon footprint, it would make very little sense to buy a Kindle. To use a particular example, residents of Tompkins County, N.Y., borrowed the non-fiction book "Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania" 42 times in 2015. That puts the carbon footprint per reader of the book at 0.18 kilograms, and for more popular books the number would further approach zero. Considering this number as an example, a Kindle would need to displace more than 1,700 similar library books over five years to reach efficiency.
In conclusion, the Kindle can be an environmentally sound option, but only within certain parameters. Only if a given consumer will purchase more than eight new books per year for five years would the Kindle be the environmental choice. Given the enormous upfront cost of producing a Kindle, for many people, borrowing from the library or even buying second hand books would be a greener decision. Technology has the potential to significantly reduce carbon emissions, and Kindles have proven both popular and effective, but we shouldn’t forget the good that can come from simple reuse.
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