Discussion on:

Infographic: The sustainability of tablets

Where are the environmental damage statistics for mining and refining the materials used in the construction of the average device? Those have longer lasting effects than the harvesting of trees for paper. Even the recycling process introduces its own pollution into the environment and energy costs. And then there is the fact that most of these devices are designed to be replaced within 1-3 years (the device manufacturers would of course prefer 1 year).

I've read other articles espousing the "green" aspect of going paperless
in regards to using electronic devices, and few touch on the aspect of
what do we do with the old devices. Sort of like not being able to see the
forest for the trees...yes, I know, bad pun!

We need it NOW. It's almost Holiday / Gift giving season and I really need a comprehensive (Features) comparison chart for all of the (TABLET) products available. The market is now (IMHO) flooded with 'obfuscation' to totally confuse the buying public.
PLEASE HELP !!!

1. LED lights are much more environmentally friendly and really taking over now, as well as being much safer to use than the CFLs are.

Also the paper in printed books can be recycled into new books etc.

2. A printed book has a life span of many decades and once it's produced it costs no more for another person to use or read it. Yet an electronic copy has to be electronically transferred between systems and cost a bit in power etc to be read each time you do or for each person who reads it. Also many electronic documents from the 1980s can no longer be used due to the systems used then no longer being in use. It's hoped the new e-book styles will stay around a long, but think of how many Beta videos are now useless due to the hardware to sue them not being available, and we may see the same sort of result when this current format war between iPad, Nook, and Kindle reaches a conclusion.

On a related issue, I'd like to know what's going on to recycle the materials used in e-waste. Years ago I worked for a company that maintained 20 year old, and older, mainframes and we were often asked to dispose of the very old gear the clients were replacing. One of my tasks was to arrange that and I actually made a profit from the e-waste disposal of old IBM mainframes by first recovering the brass, copper, and gold from the systems and then putting the remaining metal through for recycling as well.

The fact that Apple and Samsung are offering discounts if you exchange your outdated tablet for a new one is nice and exchange programs have been in place for some time; however, the discount is not enough to offset the cost of buying direct or through designated channels, when deeper discounts are still offered through discount resellers. Couple that with the fact that there are many more manufacturers of electronics who don't have this recycle policy.

This article does not seem to take into account the 1000's of litres of water used in the mining, manufacture,transportation and selling of a device. Although the figures are not current, an article published by the UN in 2004 (http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=10007&Cr=computer&Cr1) stated that about 1500 L of water are used to manufacture of a desktop PC. I would imagine that an iPad would still consume hundreds if not thousands of litres of water in its manufacture. Even the reprocessing of e-waste as these devices are turned over for newer and better ones would require vast amounts of water. The reprocessing of a book, possibly after it has gone through the hands of many readers, will still require the use of water - but how much?. The calculations are not as simple as this article makes out. Comparing the 7 gallons (35 L) of water to manufacture a book to the half a litre of water needed to write an e-book is somewhat misleading if you consider the total cost of both the information and the media in which they are written etc etc.

These comments and this article are interesting since they all seem to accept the premise that humans cause carbon emissions that are damaging the planet. Words like "sustainability" are part of the vocabulary of those spreading this unproven hypothesis.

The vast majority of the climatologist community disagrees with you but you know better ... right?!

spent the last few years studying the climate as shown in the human met bureau reports for the last 200 plus years who claim the majority of the co2 emissions and planetary damage is done by man; and the scientist who've spent the last few decades studying the climate as shown in the natural records for the last 50,000 plus years who say what humans have done in the last few centuries is a just a fly speck of **** compared to nature.

Now we all agree we should keep any emissions low - well, I think we should agree. But that doesn't mean we should spread total ******** to justify wasting billions on BS programs so a few politicians can look good while seeming to be fixing a problem that doesn't really exist.

When Mount St Helen's blew it's top it put out mire CO2 and other green house gas emissions than the whole human race has done in more than several thousand years. And that's a fairly common natural event.

The records they go off about the average global temperature raising in the last couple of centuries are from meteorological stations that only started measuring a bit over 200 years ago, a few years AFTER a major volcanic eruption in Indonesia the year before that caused a significant drop in global temperatures to the extent that frosts occurred in the height of summer world wide - they called that year the Year without Summer - - I think it was 1816. The average global temperature has NOT yet climbed back up to what it was prior to that eruptions - Ave Glob temp as calculated from maritime logs of the era available in archives.

So yes, he DOES know better than the idiot wankers who promote human caused global warming. It's nature rebalancing from the 1815 Mount Tembora eruption.

"Scientists do not disagree about human-caused global warming. It is the ruling paradigm of climate science, in the same way that plate tectonics is the ruling paradigm of geology. We know that continents move. We know that the earth is warming and that human emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause. These are known facts about which virtually all publishing scientists agree. "

http://www.jamespowell.org/index.html

And by the way, you are also completely wrong on the pile of nonsense you wrote about volcanism.

claim and have records to prove that humans are NOT the major factors in global warming. In fact there is human evidence that the world was much warmer than it is today in at least two periods in the last three thousand years. So, since we know the temperature has gone up and down, to claim humans are the main cause in global warming, you also have to claim they've caused global cooling at other times too.

... that published 99.8% of the scientific articles on the subject over the last two decades?

How many printed books does it take to match the environmental damage caused by creating one tablet?
How many books will the average tablet prevent printing? I'd guess between 0-1 for most people.