Four Billion Trees

That's how many trees are cut down each year to create paper products. One of those products, of course, is the daily newspaper, which about 1.7 billion people read every day. Each person in the United States uses 749 pounds of paper every year (adding up to 187 billion pounds per year for the entire population, by far the largest per capita consumption rate of paper for any country in the world).*

I'm not a scientist or a mathematician and don't have any evidence to offer to support this statement, but our planet cannot sustain this. I could spend the time to gather data using Google, but it's pretty obvious: not only are there not enough trees to continue this, but the cost to our global environment and to local ecosystems in creating, shipping and disposing of these wood and paper products is overwhelmingly deleterious.

We're seeing only the beginning of the sea change that the Internet and personal computing will bring to the way we send and receive information in the future. The decline in newspaper readership is an example of this. The new generation of e-books and e-reading devices is the flip side.

The photo above shows the new Plastic Logic Reader, which is designed to display full 8 1/2 x 11 digital pages: Word documents, newspapers, magazines, PDFs, books -- you name it. It's about the same size and weight as a pad of paper and is designed to compete with the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader Digital Book, among others. My point here is not to evaluate one or more of these products, but to envision the potential for them.

Here is what I would like to see and hope some of the visionaries at companies like Apple will make it happen: A device like the Plastic Logic Reader that is a digital reader, Internet-capable tablet-style personal computer, cell phone, video and still camera, video conferencing, television, and music storage and playback device.

Basically, it should be a cross between my MacBook, iPod and Blackberry; and all in the form of a device the size of a pad of paper. It should use a Bluetooth stereo headset for voice phone calls and listening to music, and include voice recognition software so we can dictate messages and documents while doing things like driving, cooking or making love (not! -- just checking to see if you were following along here). I'd spend what I do now on the print edition to have the Los Angeles Times delivered wirelessly to the device every morning. There's your business model.

The technology is available today -- all we need is to give it the proper footprint. So, what are we waiting for? Let's get to work and save four billion trees!


* Source: Ecology.com