Visual Epidemic

Today is blog action day and the topic is climate change. Last week I was at a conference and had a marvelous time. At the conference they gave us USB sticks with all the conference information on them. Considering the number of full papers, my first thought was, ‘oh, how green of them!’. They never said this was to be green, I just assumed. But this little stick got me thinking. I wonder how much greener this little plastic stick is over papers. Especially when the papers were online before the conference. In theory, no one is going to print out all the papers at such a diverse conference.Then I remembered something I read once about how reading a newspaper online is  actually less green than reading the hard copy. Of course, it is not that simple. If you look at the graph below, you can see that energy is produced more or less efficiently in different countries, and that difference plays an important roll in your comparison energy consumption versus paper usage. For example, in Sweden energy is produced in a variety of ways which makes 30 minutes online reading the newspaper comparable to reading the hard copy. But if you only read for 10 minutes, however, then to be ‘green’ you should read the online version. (Still not that simple, but you get the picture)

from "Read Online or In Print: What’s the Greener Way to Get Your News?" at treehugger.com

SO back to the USB stick. Are they really greener than printing lots of paper version? I want to venture no in this particular instance for several reasons. First, they are all plastic (unlike the nice recycled paper ones shown above). Second, the papers were all online before the conference. Most print out what they find relevant  – thus paper. And third, while the devices themselves do not need energy, reading them on your computer does. Figuring out the green option is not cut and dry. It is not simple. We need to read and educate ourselves on the origin of the various objects that populate our world. And yes, that does seem like a lot of work considering the amount of stuff we/people tend to collect – but maybe that also says something about the necessity of our collections.

So for next year, dear conference. I DID have the best time with you. And I will be back next year. But why don’t we stick to having the papers online. We can download what we need and forget about the plastic dongles. A happy medium, yes?

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