MeatyREADS

Eco-Libris

March 23, 2008 – 12:26 pm by BH

Eco-Libris is a startup company that lets consumers pay to plant a tree to offset the paper used in books. (HT) The trees are planted in developing countries, so the purchase does not directly offset trees consumed in the US. Here is a good interview with Raz Godelnik, founder. I kind of like the idea, but there are problems.

Economist Aaron Schiff writes:

The idea is, you make a donation that goes towards planting trees to ‘replace’ the trees that were cut down to produce your book.

But the trees your book is made out of were planted to make paper in the first place, right? So it’s not like reading a book causes fewer trees. In fact, reading more books should cause more trees. As demand for paper goes up, more trees need to be planted to produce that paper. We don’t need to feel guilty about reading books if all we care about is the number of trees. If everybody read 10,000 books per year every year, the planet would probably have to be covered with trees to produce the paper required.

This is why people dislike economists. You take what seems to be a perfectly nice company and then point out how the incentives are all wrong. Schiff goes on to argue that the startup might actually result in fewer trees being planted. Of course, it is not necessarily the number of trees per se that we are concerned with. It is really the ecological damage that results after widespread deforestation that we are concerned with, such as in the Amazon. Eco-libris does not address this directly, which is a shame.

Ultimately, it seems silly to use trees for books since there are better alternatives, such as hemp. With scarce resources investing in ebook readers makes more sense. Despite their energy use, ebook readers, such as the Kindle, seem much more environmentally friendly.