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How “Green” is Your Tablet?
Replacing books with tablets, e-readers won’t solve environmental issues.

By Erin McHenry

 
Imagine a pile of rusted metal, cracked screens and wasted resources piled 30,000 feet high — roughly 20 Willis Towers. That’s approximately the amount of electronic waste the United States produces in a year.

A good portion of that pile comes from e-readers and tablets, the very devices that save trees, but the production process, data usage and disposal methods create a carbon footprint just as significant, said Don Carli, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Communication in New York.

“Generally speaking, what we have to think about is these devices are not going to magically be better for the environment,” Carli said.

When produced, used and disposed of irresponsibly, tablets can actually be worse for the environment than a book, he said. Think Mag reached out to Apple, Microsoft and Samsung to discuss the production process of the iPad, Surface and Galaxy tablets. Each declined to comment. But according to a 2013 report from the Green Electronics Council, more than 200 pounds of carbon dioxide is released during the production of a tablet.

Take the iPad 2. According to an Apple environmental report, the device emits nearly 190 pounds of carbon dioxide in production and more than 280 pounds over the entirety of its life cycle. The National Resources Defense Council reports that one pound of carbon dioxide would fill about a two-foot-wide exercise ball; so one iPad 2 would create about 190 exercise balls, in its production phase alone.

The process demands a lot of water, too. According to a life-cycle assessment by The New York Times, it requires 79 gallons of water to produce a tablet — enough for a 30-minute shower.

Multiply those two factors by about 60 million e-readers and maybe that iPad isn’t as environmentally friendly as you thought. Especially when you add in all the minerals and rare earth elements needed to produce all those tablets. Thirty-three pounds of minerals must be extracted to build a single tablet or e-reader, according to The New York Times. One such rare metal, Carli said, is tantalum. According to the Royal Society of Chemistry, the sheer, thin metal is incredibly resistant to corrosion and heat, making it ideal for capacitors. Capacitors are used to store energy; they act as the battery for a cellphone or laptop when disconnected from a charger.

But before a capacitor can be built, manufacturers must sand and melt the extracted tantalum, which has a melting point of more than 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s more than twice as hot as the lava spouted from an average volcano.

Again, that’s just during production.

“Then I’m going to be constantly plugging that device in,” Carli said, “and then after 18 months I’m going to toss it into some bin where it’s picked up and shipped over to Africa where some 8-year-old kid starts cracking it open on a rock and melting it with silver. So you stop for a second and think, this is supposed to be better?”

But comparing tablets to print is like comparing apples to oranges; there is no common unit of measurement. Books aren’t a solution either. The Green Press Initiative estimates it takes 30 million trees each year to produce the books sold in the United States alone.

“The reality is, there is no medium without an environmental impact,” Carli said.

The key is responsible usage. For this reason, Carli said, environmental efficiency must be a priority across all platforms.

“Because we’re depending so much more on digital technology and information communication technology as the population grows, and our per capita use of these systems is proliferating,” Carli said, “if they don’t make them a thousand times more efficient in energy use and materials, we won’t have enough energy or water or resources to keep making them and there won’t be enough places to put them.”

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