There’s a hobby I participate in (a scavenger hunt type thing), in which information you need is found online. Due to the complicated nature of this information it must be carried with you - too much to memorize.
I was having a discussion with another participant (who printed the info out) saying I took screen captures on my phone (as a way of transporting the needed info) to be ecologically responsible, given there is about a net loss of 5 billion trees a year [this hobby can frequently takes place in the outback away from the convenience of cell towers]. They countered that the deforestation due to mining for minerals needed to produce cell phones was even worse.
Is my pollyanna view too simplified? Without knowing much about either, it seems the raw materials to make a printer would have its own carbon footprint.
I’m not trying to save the world but I am curious about which method has the least global impact.
It seems to me that it would depend on whether you and the other person already owed the phone and the printer anyway, in which case only the paper and the toner would have to be measured against the electricity your phone consumes for scanning, storing, displaying and erasing the information. If that is the case, and I guess it probably is, as I think it unlikely any of you has bought his devices solely for the game, your approach wins hands down.
The hardware would presumably be an example of a sunk cost. If you had access to infinite information, you could calculate what percentage of the printer’s life-time workload would be represented by printing that particular thing, and then apply that percentage to the ecological cost of manufacturing and transporting the printer.
Next would be calculating the electricity used in printing that page(s), finding out the source of the electricity, etc. And then of course similar calculations for the physical paper.
Rinse and repeat for the phone.
I’m fairly certain that printing the information has the greater impact, considering (in part) that a printer is much bigger physically than a phone, but shares certain similarities otherwise.
That’s the technical view. On the other hand, the impact from either one (considered on a one-time basis) would be so small, that from a “big-picture” view, there wouldn’t be any noticeable difference.