Greenpeace has decided that US readers should boycott the US edition of the latest Harry Potter and buy the Canadian edition instead, because the Canadian edition is printed on recycled paper.
Harry Potter and the Half-Wit Prigs explains, scathingly, why this isn’t a good idea:
We can leave aside all those inconvenient little facts about the paper industry, like people go out and plant the trees that they later turn into books, that paper recycling itself produces waste (including, it is said, dioxins) and that the collection of paper to be recycled is highly energy intensive. Indeed, if we try and pick our way through the claims and counterclaims of which is best for the environment or the economy, virgin or reused, we will no doubt end up as deranged as a Greenpeace member.Fortunately we don’t have to. We already have a simple and convenient system for measuring whether one process or another uses more or less resources. It’s called the price. This is exactly what markets do, they aggregate all the costs of production into one single set of digits. A lower number means less resources used, a higher one more.