If you were, or are, a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, you may have seen an episode where Captain Picard is relaxing in his quarters, reading a book printed on paper!  Well, he likes antiques.  But for everybody else on board the starship, they read their books on the computer mainframe, or even on hand-held devices, so that the starship could carry millions upon millions of books, with not a single tree having been cut down to provide the paper on which to prevent them.

We’re at that point now.  Amazon, for example, has introduced the Kindle, an electronic book reader that can store 1,500 books in its innards.  That’s a pretty decent sized library!

Of course there’s a drawback.  (There always is, isn’t there?) If you forget your book on a bus or plane trip, you’re only out about $9.  If you forget your Kindle (and people have been known to do it!) you’re out about $300!  And a Kindle, like any other mechanical device, will eventually give out, and then it’s off to the landfill with it.  Whereas, books can be recycled.

Nevertheless, if you’re a reader, a Kindle or other book reader is a good thing to have.  (Indeed, the Kindle has plenty of competition.  Sites like Project Gutenberg offer thousands of public domain offerings, which you can read right on your computer.  Other eBook readers include the Sony Reader’s Touch and the Bookeen Cybook.

But the electronic revolution will help limit what goes into landfills in other ways.  Take compact discs, for example, for music albums.  Until very recently, you had to buy compact discs, which came in plastic cases, which themselves came in lots and lots of packaging in the hopes of deterring shoplifting.

Well, there’s no need to buy CD’s anymore.  You can purchase music online now, either a whole album or individual songs.  That will save a lot in packaging and plastic costs, once more and more people get used to using the service.

Then there’s the case of DVDs.  And here again, many movies and TV series episodes are available for download online, so once again there’ll be no need to buy them from a store, and deal with all that packaging.  And with all your movies and TV shows on computer, and all your books on an eBook reader, that will leave you with plenty of shelving on which to place collectibles, pots of plants, and so on!