It must come as no surprise to you that the print industry (books, newspapers and magazines) has a huge carbon footprint due to the production (cutting down trees for raw material) and distribution. You are already taking a step in the right direction by reading TechTheFuture (hopefully from your laptop or mobile device? :P).

But of course there are more rigorous ways to take action. One of them would be to start using an e-reader to replace your paper books! However, like our collegues at Ecogeek I wondered how the e-reader's carbon footprint, resulting of the production (raw material and sending small parts around the world) and distribution of it, compares to that of paper books. Luckily for both of us, a company called the Cleantech Group crunched the numbers, and came with the answer: by buying 22½ e-books, you compensate for the e-reader's production and power usage. Any book over this magic number and your carbon footprint starts to shrink! (This particular study was conducted with Amazon's Kindle, but I think it's safe to say it won't differ much between different e-readers. Go e-ink!)
Photo by ceslava.com