How many books does it take to save a planet?

July 16, 2009 11:05 AM

Worried about the environmental impact of your book buying habits? The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina suggests you consider how your books are being shipped.(SLYP)
posted by Toekneesan (43 comments total)

That was great.

In Toronto, Pages bookstore is actually closing its doors. If only this video had come out sooner!
posted by chunking express at 11:17 AM on July 16

This is great! Love the style of the video.

Occasionally we get something from Amazon at work. It shocks me how often they'll ship one book in a box full of plastic air pillows. I assume they've done the math and feel they can absorb whatever loss it represents to pay for square footage in shipping they don't use. But it saddens me that we accept this level of waste as routine.
posted by Miko at 11:20 AM on July 16

Since I buy all my books at the Regulator, I guess I'm in the clear.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 11:21 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

We have a wonderful local bookseller. He likes to talk about how often people come in and compliment the store and then say something like "Aw, we used to have a store like this in my town, and I really miss them...but [big boxbook store/Amazon] put them out of business." Tom responds "Those other companies didn't put them out of business...the store's customers did." Keeping local brick and mortar stores alive takes conscious commitment.
posted by Miko at 11:21 AM on July 16 [5 favorites has favorites]

That was well-done. Does their math hold up though? I buy "more boxes=more trucks and planes," but 3X boxes=3X trucks and planes? I can imagine scenarios where that's not true, depending on the capacity of the transportation and whether it usually moves at capacity or at some percentage of it. I know I'm being persnickety, but I'd be curious to know more about it.

Also, if I special-order a book from my local bookstore, is it necessarily shipped bundled with other books, at capacity? Or might it also come from the distributor in a single-book or double-book box?
posted by not that girl at 11:23 AM on July 16

An Amazon box gave me the clap.
posted by steef at 11:33 AM on July 16

An Amazon box gave me the clap.

It's not necessary to lick the stamps nowadays.
posted by Smart Dalek at 11:41 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

My books arrive by flying through the air, wirelessly.

Yes, I am a Kindle snob!!

Don't diss my muffuggin Kindle!!
posted by newfers at 11:53 AM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

Last book I ordered online shipped wrapped in wall paper and brown paper bag. Was very happy with it. I wouldn't order from amazon. Half/ebay is the way to go.
posted by tomas316 at 11:53 AM on July 16

I don't know how to read.
posted by Astro Zombie at 11:55 AM on July 16 [3 favorites has favorites]

I simply find someone who's already read the book and eat their pineal gland. Carbon negative!
posted by Iridic at 12:02 PM on July 16 [4 favorites has favorites]

Is there a service that will ship you one page at a time via postcard?
posted by mattbucher at 12:02 PM on July 16

Good thing everyone only walks or rides bikes to their local bookstore, otherwise all the individual car trips would add up!

But seriously, I'm glad to see my local bookstore supports my use of amazon kindle.
posted by ShadowCrash at 12:10 PM on July 16

Worried about the environmental impact of your book buying habits?

Nope.
posted by Hovercraft Eel at 12:30 PM on July 16 [5 favorites has favorites]

I go to the library.
posted by OolooKitty at 12:40 PM on July 16

I wouldn't order from amazon. Half/ebay is the way to go.

Yeah, I have a heavy habit of getting used books online. They are just so damn cheap most of the time, it's irresistible. Book Burro helps.
posted by exogenous at 1:02 PM on July 16

That was well-done. Does their math hold up though? I buy "more boxes=more trucks and planes," but 3X boxes=3X trucks and planes? I can imagine scenarios where that's not true, depending on the capacity of the transportation and whether it usually moves at capacity or at some percentage of it. I know I'm being persnickety, but I'd be curious to know more about it.

Also, if I special-order a book from my local bookstore, is it necessarily shipped bundled with other books, at capacity? Or might it also come from the distributor in a single-book or double-book box?

I was under the impression that having items shipped through fedex or UPS was better for the environment in several ways.

1. The UPS truck comes by every day, whether or not I order something anyway. Unless the amount of books bought online drastically increases or decreases, the number of trucks used won't change.

2. If I was going to buy at my "local" book store, it would require a 10-20 minute drive, which would be a single car trip's fuel for the transportation of a single book back and forth from the book store. If the local bookstore was within walking distance, then it might be a net savings, but I'd have to see the numbers if it was a carbon emission savings.

Of course, if a person was really interested in saving the environment, they'd use a Kindle. Electronics are rather light on the carbon emissions compared to atoms.
posted by zabuni at 1:13 PM on July 16

For more discussion about online purchases and their environmental impact, here's a link from Worldchanging.
posted by zabuni at 1:15 PM on July 16

What's missing from the equation is the fact that while 24 books may come in the box that's delivered to the store, there's also 24 car trips from homes to that store. Okay, fewer if you bike there.

There was an article in the nytimes (?) recently that made a similar point about how the local food movement is not nearly as eco-friendly as it claims because there is a vast carbon inefficiency in having a ton of lightly-loaded mid-size delivery trucks bringing food from the farm to each of a buttload of widely dispersed stores, compared to one very densely packed semi bringing it from farther away but delivering it to a single central distribution center, where it is then shipped to the stores combined in batches with many other items.
posted by Rhomboid at 1:19 PM on July 16

This is an excellent argument against dead tree books. Well done!
posted by found missing at 1:23 PM on July 16

Paper is sequestered carbon.
posted by exogenous at 1:40 PM on July 16

I have each word carved into a plank of rare rain forest hardwood and shipped to me by air, with the aircraft stopping over at an airport so that it spells out the word that it is shipping. That way I can just read the shipping manifesto and burn the crap when it arrives.
posted by Elmore at 2:00 PM on July 16

You know what?

GO TO THE FUCKING LIBRARY, DIPSHITS.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:15 PM on July 16

They don't mention that the way that the book business works is that unsold hardback and trade paperback books get shipped back to the publisher, who refunds the bookseller the price of the book. (With unsold mass market books, you rip off the cover, send that back for a refund, and put the book in the trash. Super eco-friendly!) That's the deal that publishers and booksellers struck years ago to get booksellers to take a chance on books that might not sell. When you order from Amazon, you order the book you know you want, and it only gets shipped one way. A lot of books at the local independent bookstore are going to make another trip back to the warehouse from whence they came.

So yeah. I'm in favor of independent bookstores, but I'm not buying the environmental argument. And I agree that environmentally concerned readers should consider riding their bikes to the library.
posted by craichead at 2:24 PM on July 16 [3 favorites has favorites]

I don't think I like your tone.
posted by found missing at 2:24 PM on July 16

What's the life-cycle analysis on a kindle?
posted by Miko at 2:32 PM on July 16

Tom responds "Those other companies didn't put them out of business...the store's customers did."

I expect it's more likely that the store's owners and managers, their stocking practices, and their treatment of their customers drove away said customers as soon as they had a convenient alternative.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:34 PM on July 16

one very densely packed semi bringing it from farther away but delivering it to a single central distribution center, where it is then shipped to the stores combined in batches with many other items.

These numbers are really hard to crunch so assertively, because you still have all the trips made to the stores by individual consumers, which may or may not be longer than trips made to an in-town farmer's market or directly to the farm for onsite pickup, and because the offset you get due to local farms relying so much less on fossil-fuel-intensive on-farm procedures is large enough to contend with any damage done by the additional travel of farm trucks.
posted by Miko at 2:35 PM on July 16

What's the life-cycle analysis on a kindle?

I don't know, but it's built like a tank. The e-ink display will probably last forever. It has very few moving parts. So I can easily see myself using it in 10 years unless something better comes along.
posted by me & my monkey at 2:39 PM on July 16

Sure, but the farmer's market/on-farm pickup represents an additional trip for most people, as opposed to a single trip to the supermarket.
posted by electroboy at 3:13 PM on July 16

GO TO THE FUCKING LIBRARY, DIPSHITS.

I do and sometimes they have books I want to read* but often they don't. The Wake County Library system (Raleigh and surrounding area) hasn't got a single book by R.L. Delderfield. Not one. Even the librarian was apologetic. If I wanted to read James Patterson or Danielle Steele, however, I would be in luck.

I am especially naughty because I recently discovered Persephone Books so now I'm getting books shipped from the UK. But they are so glorious.

*I'm reading The Last Dickens right now and it is wonderful.
posted by Secret Life of Gravy at 3:13 PM on July 16

Sure, but the farmer's market/on-farm pickup represents an additional trip for most people, as opposed to a single trip to the supermarket.

Most people drive very non-strategically already. We didn't see people mapping out the most efficient route until gas peaked at over $4. We have to note that this errand comes out of 'errand time' and likely replaces another activity that would be similarly gas-intensive.

The 'single trip to the supermarket' standing in opposition to a trip to a farmstand is a bit mythological in a world in which most people make at least one unnecessary trip a day. Going out of the way to take the kids to DD after a soccer game. Running down to 7-11 for gas so you don't have to stop on the way to work tomorrow. Making multiple trips to the grocery store per week, because the hours are long and it's so convenient and it's much too much trouble to plan ahead and do a week's shopping in one trip. These "quick trips" account for more than 50% of shopping trips, and, because they tend to result in a small number of purchases, are thus highly inefficient. With a CSA box or a weekly market, the shopping opportunity is constrained and limits the number of runs per week. There's no such limit on grocery stores. The farm trip is a "special purpose" trip, but because it accounts for a higher dollar purchase, is much more efficient than the frequent and small trips most Americans make at least twice a week. A person can also drive a couple extra miles along a long country road for exactly the same amount of gas it takes to sit and idle at a string of lights every 100 yards in a typical strip shopping area in town, especially where there are multiple stops and parking lot repositionings. Those stores also require energy systems, heating and cooling that are less efficient than those at farm stands.

In a real-world analysis, it becomes quite hard to show a net carbon gain from shipping more goods to more large chain stores. People's habits are just too complicated to presume that no other changes are made when food sourcing changes People's behaviors don't remain constant with one trip added or subtracted, they come out of an available-time pool that is constantly changing, and decisions to make or not make them result from calculations involving time, cost, values, priorities, resource efficiency, preference, price of gas, vehicle capacity, etc. It took very expensive gas to make people act efficiently about regular errands, consolidating and streamlining them for least miles driven. UNtil that's regular practice, it makes little sense to point to additional miles being driven here or there for food, when at present people drive additional miles for the movies, for electronics, for dinner out, for amusement, and basically because there are no limiting factors other than how much money in gas they're willing to burn. Meanwhile, people going out of their way to get food from a local farm are probably among the most likely people to be conscious of their resource use and to arrange carpooling and turn-taking for CSA pickup, do more shopping in each trip to last the week (thus reducing other trips out for food during the week), and be more conservative with fuel in other areas of their lives too.
posted by Miko at 3:37 PM on July 16 [2 favorites has favorites]

A piece on driving habits and gas price peak in 2005:

Consider that the average American household used its cars and trucks for 496 shopping trips in 2001, according to an exhaustive survey of 160,000 Americans conducted by the Transportation Department. Trips were 7.02 miles in length, on average, for a total of 3,482 miles per household per year. That much driving could almost get you from New York to Juneau, Alaska, give or take a few hundred miles.

That's a lot farther than in 1990, when the average household's shopping trips could only get you from New York to Denver. Part of the difference stems from the fact that the length of an average shopping trip was 5.1 miles in 1990. Blame greater suburban sprawl for longer trips these days.

But the average household also took just 341 shopping trips in 1990, back in a pre-latte era when there were just a few dozen Starbucks stores and coffee was something to be brewed at home. People are now taking more shopping trips than trips to and from work.

Of course, determining how driving miles are put to use through surveys is hardly an exact science. "Not only is it difficult, it's getting more difficult, because more people are blending work and pleasure," said Doug Hecox, a spokesman for the Federal Highway Administration.

....people can squeeze some savings here and there, even if less shopping is out of the question. Consider other areas of driving inflation. The average household is making 47 trips to doctors and dentists each year, up from 18 in 1990, according to the highway administration's surveys. The number of trips to school or church has risen to 105 per year from 89. Driving vacations have quadrupled from two to eight.

About the only thing Americans have been cutting back on is visiting friends and relatives, with such trips down to 129 per year from 149 in 1990. At 14.89 miles per visit on average, cutting out an additional 20 would save 300 more miles per year.

posted by Miko at 3:51 PM on July 16

GO TO THE FUCKING LIBRARY, DIPSHITS.

Friends with a lot of authors, are you?
posted by IndigoJones at 4:00 PM on July 16

When I worked in bookstores, rarely (if ever) did individual books come in for customer orders. At the big chain store, they would wait until one of their warehouses could fill a box for us and then ship it out. In the indie shop it was pretty much the same way, except the big boxes were coming from Ingram.
posted by drezdn at 5:45 PM on July 16

GO TO THE FUCKING LIBRARY, DIPSHITS.

Friends with a lot of authors, are you?

All my friends are trees.
posted by Sys Rq at 6:53 PM on July 16

not that girl: "That was well-done. Does their math hold up though? I buy "more boxes=more trucks and planes," but 3X boxes=3X trucks and planes? I can imagine scenarios where that's not true, depending on the capacity of the transportation and whether it usually moves at capacity or at some percentage of it."

An extremely good point. According to a friend who is a transpo logistician, the limiting factor in most transportation scenarios is weight, not volume. Most long-haul trucks and planes go out with some empty space because of weight limits; they typically don't go out underweight because they've run out of volume. (There are some situations where apparently this is not the case, and I'd imagine if everyone started using really huge-but-lightweight packages it might throw FedEx for a serious loop.)

But this explains why the largest component of shipping charges is based on the weight, not the volume, for non-oversize packages. And this is why it's economical for Amazon to have a smaller selection of cardboard boxes and just use the next one up when a book doesn't fit in the smaller one. The "waste" is really only in the additional cardboard between one size and the next, and maybe in the bubble wrap or loose-fill that they use to stop the book from banging around. As long as the package doesn't trigger any of the size penalties — and I'm sure they buy boxes that don't, or discourage the use of boxes that do — it might cost them that much extra.

Personally I think if you want to look at wasteful packaging, it's all the stuff that's sold from mail-order warehouses that's still packed up in "retail" clamshells or heat-sealed plastic. Not only are those things a blatant safety hazard to get open, they're just unnecessary. Items that ship direct from a warehouse to a customer aren't as vulnerable to stick-it-in-your-pants shoplifting, and it doesn't make sense to protect them the same way. Nor does the packaging need to "sell" the product with lots of glossy photos meant to make it jump off a shelf. Minimalist, bulk-oriented packaging would be just fine. I've been very glad to see Amazon making some strides in this direction, although I don't believe for a minute that it's really for the customer's benefit (at least not completely). Higher-density packaging means products take up less space in a warehouse, which means lower cost per SKU and more SKUs per warehouse, translating into better selection, lower shipping times, etc. But it's one way where what's good for a retailer like Amazon actually ends up being a win-win, as it's good for the customer as well.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:56 PM on July 16 [2 favorites has favorites]

Oh and the Kindle probably isn't all that great: manufacturing it has got to be a fairly resource-intensive process and disposal poses all the usual e-waste concerns. Books can be resold on the secondary market and/or pulped and recycled.

Amazon does have a way to report packaging that is absurdly sized, in order to better adjust box sizes. Most of the books I get from them come in flat packs not much larger than the item itself.
posted by zachlipton at 8:24 PM on July 16

GO TO THE FUCKING LIBRARY, DIPSHITS.

I used to go to the library until they rebuilt it to look like an upside-down dixie cup... ON FIRE. Someone thought that giant metal flames surrounding the building would be great symbolism.

It makes me uncomfortable.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 8:38 PM on July 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

me & my monkey: Amazon has only been around since 1995. While a successful company, it may well be gone in 10 years or at least be radically different. Similarly, there's little reason to believe that Sprint will still offer wireless service for the Kindle in 10 years or that their network will even be backward compatible with the current technology, if the company exists at all. The battery will most probably be pretty worn out by then, and it's not easily user replaceable on the Kindle 2. The e-ink screen does involve tons of tiny moving parts and certainly will prove to have a finite lifetime, although I don't know the expected timeframes on that. The file formats supported by the Kindle will probably be out of date and hard to find, except for ASCII text, which doesn't allow much in the way of style or formatting. Finally, flash memory can only be written to a finite number of times.

And I wouldn't say it's built like a tank. The Kindle 2 seems to be better, but hardware failures on the Kindle 1 were pretty darn common as numerous blogs can attest. I had to have mine replaced under warranty and my dad had to have his replaced twice.

In other words, I doubt that most people will be using their Kindles in 10 years. While there may be some exceptions--some people are still using their 10 year old computers--its lifespan is definitely not that long. I like my Kindle, but I don't consider it to be a device for the ages.
posted by zachlipton at 8:41 PM on July 16

They don't mention that the way that the book business works is that unsold hardback and trade paperback books get shipped back to the publisher, who refunds the bookseller the price of the book. (With unsold mass market books, you rip off the cover, send that back for a refund, and put the book in the trash. Super eco-friendly!) That's the deal that publishers and booksellers struck years ago to get booksellers to take a chance on books that might not sell. When you order from Amazon, you order the book you know you want, and it only gets shipped one way. A lot of books at the local independent bookstore are going to make another trip back to the warehouse from whence they came. *

this isn't entirely true - Amazon has it's own warehouses where they order & stock books from publishers, just like a bookstore, and Amazon returns/destroys books all the time, far more often than any given bookstore - unless, of course, you're talking about B&N, then it's like a returns party every day!

and many books at the local independent bookstore will be put on sale & discounted before being sent back - this doesn't happen at all at Amazon, as far as i know
posted by jammy at 10:18 AM on July 17

Amazon has it's own warehouses where they order & stock books from publishers, just like a bookstore, and Amazon returns/destroys books all the time, far more often than any given bookstore

Well, sure, Amazon returns more books than any given bookstore, because Amazon is vastly bigger than any given bookstore. I would be really surprised if Amazon returned at the same rate as any given bookstore, because warehouse space is a whole lot cheaper than retail space. It costs Amazon a lot less to store a book and wait for it to sell than it does your local bookstore.

and many books at the local independent bookstore will be put on sale & discounted before being sent back

This didn't happen at the independent bookstore where I worked. One of my jobs was to pull returns. Once a week, I got a list of books, pulled those books off the shelf, and took them down to receiving to be sent back to the warehouse. We had discount books, but they were remainders that were shipped out separately. We also discounted bestsellers, to compete with Borders and B&N. But non-sellers didn't get discounted: they just got returned.

Mostly, though, I just think this is an ineffective marketing technique. You can't guilt people into shopping at independent bookstores. This ad at least has a light touch, but I still think bookstores should lay off the moral crap and concentrate on emphasizing the positive things that they offer to customers.
posted by craichead at 10:33 AM on July 17 [1 favorite has favorites]

I used to work in a strip mall bookstore in the early 90s, pre-Amazon. It was pretty dead most of the time, which was nice, because it meant I could sit behind the counter and read most of the day and get paid $6 an hour to do something I would probably be doing anyway.

So, hardly anyone came in, and when they did, they'd make a wide circuit around the perimeter of the store, eyes glazed over, casually observing the titles of the books, but not really looking for anything in particular. They'd nod or make small talk on the way out. No one ever really bought anything, and I don't blame them. We mostly carried crap, and the crap we did carry didn't appeal to any particular demographic of crap consumer. So inevitably they went out of business, but not before we all got fired because someone stole some money out of the cash register.

But long pointless anecdote aside, they went out of business because they really didn't offer anything that the Waldenbooks in the mall did. Maybe they'd have a book you like, maybe not. Or they'd have Return of the King, but not the Two Towers. None of the clerks knew anything, so there was no one to suggest a book you might like. There wasn't anywhere to hang out and read or drink coffee, no book clubs, no recommended reading lists, no book signings, guest speakers, childrens programs or open mic nights. It just wasn't a destination and no one had any reason to go there. Was it local? I guess. But it also sucked.
posted by electroboy at 1:15 PM on July 17