6 ms·

I'm under the impression that sustainable paper isn't that bad on the environment.

• magicalhippo 8y ago
  But the manuals adds weight and bulk, which contributes to CO2 when shipped. I agree tho. My mom just got her first smart phone, a Samsung S8+. She's 72 years old, she'll figure it out but not thanks to that tiny booklet that came with the phone. If she needed the manual, I'd have to print it out on A4 paper or something anyway.
  • kkarakk 8y ago
    on the other hand,the pdf manuals i see are all bloated messes of technical jargon that i have to google search to understand-ofc the only time i need to look at the manual is when i can't figure out some behavior, like oneplus 6t's fingerprint scanner animation
  • thfuran 8y ago
    >But the manuals adds weight and bulk, which contributes to CO2 when shipped. I suspect that that is a rounding error next to the manufacture of the phone itself.
    • magicalhippo 8y ago
      For fun I ran some ballpark figures, a 30 gram manual, 1 billion smartphones, primary shipping by sea, and it's on the order of 5000-10000 metric tons of CO2 to ship the manuals. Sure, the "CO2 budget" is measured in gigatons so not a huge dent. But add up a lot of these rounding errors and it might actually make a slight difference. And since the climate interactions are non-linear, slight differences can have a large effect over time.
      • benj111 8y ago
        At first I was impressed by 30 billion grams (with little finger to mouth) But that's only 30,000 tonnes. 10,000 tonnes of co2 for 30,000 tonnes of cargo seems... Wrong. This seems to back me up https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-shipping-goods https://timeforchange.org/co2-emissions-shipping-goods 10 - 40g co2 per tonne. So about an order of magnitude less. Edit: Doh see below. This is per km
        • magicalhippo 8y ago
          I used the same page :) The key is it's per ton per km transported. For reference, Shanghai to Rotterdam route (a bit of a worst case I guess) is just shy of 20000 km[1]. [1]: https://sea-distances.org/ https://sea-distances.org/
          • benj111 8y ago
            You're right (sorry) wow so worst case 800kg of co2 / tonne. And that's excluding the return journey which is typically empty. So could well be 1:1! Airfreight is 500g /tonne/km so 10 tonnes of co2 / tonne of freight. Guess that's why co2 calculators always ask about flying.
            • magicalhippo 8y ago
              I missed the per km at first as well. Air freight is not clean indeed. Which leads to a kind of ironic situation here in Norway. Salmon export is hailed as one of the primary income sources once the oil is gone, yet significant portion of the salmon is exported via air to Asian markets. Not exactly a very green change...
              • cannonedhamster 8y ago
                Coudn't that be mitigated with factory ships that produce the product en route and drop off at the end location? Ship to ship transfer is easily possible. I'm honestly asking as I don't know the true logistics behind this, but I thought factory ships already existed and did this.
      • thfuran 8y ago
        And from the figures I'm seeing, it'd be about 15,000,000 metric tons of CO2 for the manufacture of the phones to go with those manuals.