Calculating the True Cost of the Kindle

What is the environmental cost of an Amazon Kindle? At what point is the environmental impact of newspapers and books greater than the environmental cost of operating a Kindle?

For the scope of this exercise, we’ll only consider only the tangible production costs of newspapers and books: the amount of material and energy associated with the printing of the product. We’ll also omit the disposal of the products here, the user costs associated with the disposal of the Kindle may be too difficult to assess here.

print = newspaper + books = issue production cost

We’ll use a simplified formula to calculate the cost of the Kindle. Here, the production cost includes the energy and material, and the upkeep cost includes the energy needed for recharging and data transfers.

Kindle = initial production cost + upkeep cost

n represents the number of days. We’ll also note here that our production and upkeep costs includes both material and energy. But, for the owner, the Kindle’s upkeep cost only includes energy consumption.

production cost = material + energy

Then,

print = n(issue production cost)

print = n(material + energy)

And,

Kindle = initial production cost + n(upkeep cost)

Kindle = material + energy + n(energy)

I’d love to take this formula further, but without a base idea of the actual amount of materiale and energy, any results that follow would be unfounded and baseless. (Woot!) Instead, I can only assume that the Kindle has a higher initial cost of ownership–environment wise. But that product is overtaken by the material and energy costs of print products after n many days.

This is similar to the restroom electric hand-dryer versus the paper towel argument: which is most effective?