Every Sunday, the New York Times alone cuts down 75,000 trees. You can do a Google search of rainforests and immediately find some horrifying statistics: that they might disappear in 40 years, that 137 species go extinct daily from deforestation, that 1.5 acres of trees disappear every second from our planet. Anyone reading that can’t help but want to change those trends, and they can with some conscientious buying habits. Grocery stores, lumber mills, and other publications affect deforestation too, but digital newspapers are especially powerful green friendly products.
When eReaders first emerged, English professors all over the country rose up in arms, declaring the technology to be the end of the era of books. Now, a few years later, the little machines have done nothing more than promote reading. Rather than destroy modern literature, they’ve become green friendly products by saving millions of trees from paper mills. Most people use their Kindle or Nook to catch up on the newest bestseller, but there’s another option available: daily and weekly publications, delivered not on your doorstep but wirelessly into your hand.
That digital switch offers a lot of convenience. Instead of carrying a whole newspaper onto the train, people can access every article from their eReader, but the larger benefit is the effect on the earth. If Americans recycled just a tenth of their newspapers, they’d save 25 million trees a year. If a tenth of Americans switched to digital newspapers, they wouldn’t even need to recycle. That simple switch can have a huge environmental impact. There’s certainly some nostalgia associated with picking your newspaper up off the lawn, but if a digital version staves off the loss of our rainforests, it’s worth it.
