Paper production is one of the most resource-intensive processes in the world.

If virgin materials are used, producing a single 1.25 pound newspaper requires 5.5 gallons of water, 4 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy, and 2–4 pounds of wood. The harvesting of this wood harms forest ecosystems; the trucks used to transport the wood consume petroleum and pollute the air; the processing plants and paper mills that turn the wood into pulp and the pulp into paper release toxic chemicals into rivers, affecting animals living downstream—including us!

Newsprint made entirely from recycled paper is easier on the environment, but still requires significant resources: about one gallon of water and 1.4 kWh of energy per newspaper.

That doesn’t account for the dyes, chemicals, and energy needed to manufacture the ink, run the printing presses, or fuel the vehicles that transport and distribute the finished product to vendors and home-subscribers.

By comparison, spending an hour reading online news from your desktop computer consumes about .14 kWh of energy, which increases your electric bill by a little over a penny. This is one-tenth of the energy required to produce newsprint from recycled paper. In other words, you’d need to spend 10 hours reading the news online before you consumed the amount of energy used to make recycled newsprint for a single newspaper. If you were to read online news for an hour per day, over the course of a year you’d consume just over 50 kWh—about $5 worth of energy.

Watching an hour of news programming on your 50-inch plasma television consumes about .35 kilowatt-hours, which is more than you’d use by reading the news online, but is still less than the amount of energy required to produce a single newspaper. Now there’s some news about news you can use.