Digital Storage as Environmental Nightmare?

In a recent article on environmental criticism in PMLA, Karen L. Kilcup excoriates the mass amount of waste generated by academics.  Taking PMLA as an example, she calculates that" [w]ith a circulation of 32,000, bimonthly frequency, and an average page count of around three hundred, 192,000 issues with a total of 57.6 million pages are manufactured and shipped annually" (852).  This does not include the reams of paper consumed in departmental offices, libraries, and labs in universities across the country.  In response, there has been a movement to digitize the textual experience so as to cut the amount of paper used in the academy: now it is common to access scholarly articles in the form of e-readings, to post classroom work onto sites like Blackboard, and to use email as a form of correspondence that trumps the fax, memo, and letter. 

But does believing that we are saving massive amounts of paper produce a certain smug self-satisfaction that erupts in subtle doses each time we convert a piece of paper into portable document form?  And does the illusion of de-materialization, of an act of magical transformation with ourselves in the role of magician, engender triumphalist attitudes toward ecological problems? If so, here's the catch: according to a 2008 IDC study "The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe," the amount of digital material we are generating is increasing by 60% every year. This means that, to quote the study: "By 2011, there will be 1,800 exabytes of electronic data in existence, or 1.8 zettabytes (an exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes). In fact, the number of bits stored already exceeds the estimated number of stars in the universe." (http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9067639/Study_Digital_universe_an...) 

Ultimately, this data has to be stored somewhere: in tertiary and off-line sites, in corporate clusters of computer terminals, in secondary storage modes: CD-ROMs, flashdrives, SD cards, and floppies.  Thus, not surprisingly, the study also discovered that these various types of storage are "growing 50% faster than the data itself." The number of storage containers estimated for the year 2011 is "20 quadrillion, 20 million billion." So what appears to have happened is that in bypassing one storage mode (paper) for another (digitized) form, we mistakenly thought that we would be transferring (environmental) risk from the physical realm to the electronic. But the electronic is very physical: the raw materials needed to construct discs, the plastics associated with packaging, the fuel used to transport the products, the space occupied in storing the storage containers, and ultimately the task of breaking down old computers, old floppies, old monitors, old analog televisions, etc., a burden that has so far fallen to unregulated tech trash or eWaste zones of China.

So this is what the academic must remember: "A single e-mail with a 1MB attachment sent to four colleagues can generate 50MB of information in the digital universe." Thus it appears that the impetus behind the ritual purging of my massive inbox, despite its seemingly endless storage capacity, might not be insanity.