Print gets a bad rap, but digital media is no angel when it comes to the climate crisis. Magazine publishers need to consider the environmental impact of all that they do, writes Peter Houston for the Grub Street Journal.
Tech evangelists have been flogging digital as the environmentally friendly publishing option since day dot. “Stop killing trees, go digital” has been a refrain for almost all of the 35 years I’ve worked in magazines. Turns out it’s kind of bollocks.
All that stuff going on in the cloud, so soft and floaty, is spewing out carbon faster than the Orc furnaces of Isengard.
The European Commission reckons that what it calls the information and communications sector uses up to 10% of the world’s electricity, and creates almost the same level of greenhouse gas as air traffic. If no one does anything about it, that could rise to 14% by 2040.
Beyond the power used, there are all those two-year-old phones that you absolutely wouldn’t be seen dead using anymore. Global E-waste Monitor’s 2020 report put global e-waste – discarded products with a battery or plug – at 53.6 metric million tonnes in 2019.
That was a record year, but probably not for long: forecasts show the yearly tally on tech rubbish growing to almost 75 million tonnes by 2030, double what it was in 2014. And if you’re imagining all those phones and computer cables get recycled, think again. In 2019, less than 18% of e-waste was officially documented as formally collected and recycled.
So, yeah, go digital, go green.
Dirty Data
To get back to digital media, emissions come primarily from the electricity used by data centres to store and deliver web pages, social media posts and advertising. And for publishers, digital advertising is possibly the biggest carbon culprit.
Programmatic advertising auctions, huge, hidden and always on, burn through a lot of energy. Tim McDonnell, climate and energy editor for online news outlet Semafor wrote in October 2023, “Bidding for those ad slots is cost-efficient for marketers, but also energy-intensive.”
How intensive? Well, a study by media-focused carbon accounting startup Scope3 found that 1,000 digital impressions generates about 333 grammes of CO2. Add that up globally across the year and that comes to more than 7 million tonnes of CO2, about the same carbon footprint as 1.4 million American homes. And all for ads that no one ever clicks on.
Brands force change
At the Cannes Lions Festival last year, Extinction Rebellion made their views on advertising’s carbon culpability very clear. Dressed as the dogs from the house-on-fire ‘This is Fine’ meme, they stormed the exhibitor beach and occupied the roof of the congress building. In the 30-degree heat of the French Riviera in June, that’s commitment.
Clearly advertising’s attitude to the climate crisis isn’t ‘fine’, but Semafor’s McDonnell says the sector’s environmental performance has largely flown under the radar. But he also says that’s about to change, as a growing number of companies start to consider the carbon footprint of their digital publishing and marketing partners.
Regulators around the world are helping them focus, by threatening to make the disclosure of corporate climate data mandatory. And if company X has to report its emissions, it will need data from all the companies it does business with, including digital publishing platforms. If company X is Pepsi, publishers are going to have to pay attention.
Hidden carbon costs
In 2020, Channel 4’s Dispatches programme reported that one Instagram post to Cristiano Ronaldo’s 240 million followers consumed about 36 megawatt hours of electricity, the equivalent of adding 10 homes to the UK’s national grid.
Mobile network provider Vodafone reported that people attending the 2023 Glastonbury festival – the one with Elton John headlining – used enough data to download the Rocket Man biopic in HD 400 times an hour for every day of the five-day event.
Loughborough University researchers reckon that an average data-driven business (publishing anyone) employing 100 people full-time will generate approximately 2,203 tonnes of CO² a year – equivalent to flying from London to New York 2,600 times.
Punching down
There’s no question that digital publishers can reduce their carbon footprint. Business website Insider has already lopped 20% off its emissions after an audit by Scope3. The assessment considered its entire ad tech setup and analysed carbon vs. revenue. The publisher is now working on ‘Green Media Products’ to let advertisers measure and compensate for the carbon emissions associated with their advertising.
Efforts like Insider’s digital carbon reduction programme are essential, but for the broader magazine industry, there’s an easier starting point – just stop using paper as a punch bag.
It’s really difficult to compare the environmental impact of a magazine page against, say, an email newsletter. In the moment, yes, maybe that one email is way more environmentally friendly than a publication that requires raw materials, manufacture and distribution.
But how many emails are you sending, to how many people, how often and what happens to them? Data usage for the average person in the UK – including the 18,433 emails you’ve archived – is estimated to generate 22 tonnes of CO², the equivalent of 26 flights between London and New York. How many trees need to be planted to offset that?
Longer life cycles
Consider the entire lifecycle of a print product, and things start to look really different.
For starters, if you are anything like me, your favourite magazines will sit on a shelf for years and every day they are there, the environmental cost of ownership lowers. But even where magazines are not hoarded, they can be recycled. In 2018, more than 80% of paper and cardboard was recycled, according to EU data agency Eurostat.
None of this is to say ‘digital good, print bad’. The modern magazine business needs to be multidimensional to survive. Equally, the climate crisis is real, and as an industry we should be doing everything we can to reduce the environmental impact of our products and services, print and digital.
We need a holistic approach to carbon reduction.That includes stopping the whataboutery that for too long has been leveled at print to get digital off the hook.
This article originally appeared in Issue #3 of The Grub Street Journal, the magazine for people who make magazines. Brutally honest but relentlessly optimistic, we’re looking for answers to the biggest questions in modern publishing, like ‘What kind of idiots still make magazines?‘ and ‘Can you make a magazine AND a profit?‘ Get your own copy at grubstreetjournal.com.
