I suggest you buy iPad and make your friends do the same on Earth Day. It’s no kidding. It’s amazing but iPad could be even more groundbreaking Apple product than iPhone. IPad can replace all paper based education, information and entertainment items we’re currently using. Just imagine there are no more large and heavy pile of textbooks, unending number of glossy magazines and short-lived newspapers. How many paper and therefore trees can we save? Let’s assume that the average person reads 50 books per year (that including newspapers, textbooks and magazines). According to Howstuffworks.com a pine tree that’s 1 foot in diameter and 60 feet tall would produce 80,500 sheets of paper. That’s means an IPad used for 3 years will save one tree. Just imagine if we multiply these numbers by ten million, hundred million. Those saved trees could easily consume all the bad Carbon dioxide which makes our planet warmer. If you also consider all the bad chemicals and energy used to produce the paper and then to recycle it. It looks like “f…ing big deal”, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. There are many things that go into manufacturing an iPad that are easy to overlook. I recommend reading Daniel Goleman’s (science journalist, author) recent op-ed piece in the New York Times titled “How Green is my iPad?”.
If you have a little more time, I also suggest listening to a recent interview with Goleman and Dara O’Rourke (founder of GoodGuide). The interview is about the difficulty in calculating the environmental and social impact of consumer choices. It doesn’t bash the iPad (and I’m not either), but there are things that go into the creation of an iPad that should be weighed when having debates about the green impact of an iPad purchase. We can’t be honest with ourselves when making statements that strongly imply that electronics are manufactured without “all the bad chemicals”, nor can we overlook the staggering amount of water and energy needed to manufacture such products.
…If you have the money though, buy (and use) an iPad \(^_^)/