Announced in the New York Times, on July 21, the magazine industry is about to take a giant leap forward. In a step to change a format that is 150+years old, Esquire will put a digital cover on a printed magazine. The October issue of Esquire - 100,000 newsstand copies only - will sport an electronic cover incorporating technology from E Ink. (If you want to see the E Ink technology in action, take a look at Amazon’s Kindle.)

Forward Steps:

Hearst Corporation, publisher of Esquire, publishes a consumer site called The Daily Green. The site claims:

Hearst Corporation, the parent company of Hearst Magazines, has been at the forefront of raising awareness for and addressing environmental concerns. Among Hearst’s accomplishments on the environmental front:

• The company’s completion of Hearst Tower, the first gold LEED certified building in New York (honored by Global Green USA)
• Partnership with the State of California, California Rangeland Trust and American Land Conservancy in 2005 to form the largest conservation easement in history (82,000 acres) in San Simeon, CA
• Participation in philanthropic tree planning through National Arbor Day Foundation and New York Restoration Project
• Participation in ReMix - Recycling Magazines is Excellent!, a national public education campaign aimed at increasing recycling of magazines and catalogs

Backward Steps:

All well and good until you compare the “green” initiatives with the Real Cost of E-Ink, published by Fast Company.  Electronic paper is NOT as environmentally friendly as we would hope. The Times article tells us:

The batteries and the  display case are manufactured and put together in China. They are shipped to Texas and on to Mexico, where the device is inserted by hand into each magazine. The issues will then be shipped via trucks, which will be refrigerated to preserve the batteries, to the magazine’s distributor in Glazer, KY.

Fast Company writers and researchers calculated the greenhouse emissions for the cover - which is so expensive to produce it had to be sponsored by Ford’s SUV group. Here is the bad news:

The total outlay in greenhouse gas emissions for this little experiment—again, this is based on loose estimates—comes to 150 tons of CO2 equivalent, similar to the output of 15 Hummers or 20 average Americans for an entire year, and a 16% increase over the carbon footprint of a typical print publication. The potential environmental impact of the E Ink covers increases even more when you consider that the units are designed to be disposable after one use and they’ll make it more difficult or impossible to recycle the paper portion of the magazines.

Those calculations don’t take into consideration the environmental impact of disposing of all those plastic parts and batteries.

Putting on the Brakes:

While I’d love to see “today’s news on yesterday’s paper” as John Seely Brown, past director of Xerox PARC, projected in 1999, the environmental costs of making a version that will last only 90 days has slowed down my enthusiasm.