{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Flash Forward","title":"Tree Free","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1546,"description":"Today we travel to a fully digital world, a world where paper is a thing of the past. \n \n On this show we’ve tackled a huge range of futures — we’ve talked about things that are extremely likely, like, antibiotic resistance, and we’ve also talked about things that are simply never going to happen. Like space pirates dragging a second moon to earth for some reason.\n \n And when I started working on this episode, I assumed that this future was more on the likely end of the spectrum. Maybe not in a few years, but eventually, we’ll probably stop using paper, right? Well, pretty much everybody I talked to said I was wrong.\n \n The first person we talk to in this episode is Michael Makin, the President and CEO of Printing Industries of America, an organization that represents the printers all over the United States. And Printing Industries of America isn’t the only organization out there trying to keep printing alive. In 2014, a group called Two Sides launched a campaign arguing that companies who advertised paperless billing as “green” were violating guidelines set by the Federal Trade Commission. And they actually got over 20 companies to stop advertising their paperless billing options as “environmentally friendly.” And this is one of the big arguments that the paper industry makes against going without paper: that it's actually not nearly as environmentally friendly as people claim.\n \n Now, it’s hard to make blanket statements about whether paper or digital is better for the environment. Both have their upsides and downsides, but it's definitely true that many people don't realize the environmental cost of browsing things online using their devices. According to the Centre for Sustainable Communications at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, \"the environmental impact of a web based newspaper is, in general, in the same range as a printed newspaper's environmental impact.\" \n \n But Makin also says that he is totally convinced that paperlessness is just never going...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/dam2HLo-U1Ry9QrCndqL6T5UjMJXZXITXSp8qYl8vtM/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzM3MDE4LzE2NzA4/NjcyMTQtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}