Two Top Children’s Book Publishers to Unveil Green Policies
This article originally appeared in SLJ’s Extra Helping. Sign up now!
Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 10/3/2007 2:00:00 PM
Two major children’s book publishers, Scholastic and Simon & Schuster, are close to releasing their paper-use policies, which would significantly improve their impact on the environment.
The publishers would join Random House, Chronicle Books, and McGraw-Hill, which have already unveiled their paper policies to stop the use of endangered forests and maximize their use of recycled paper, says Tyson Miller, director and founder of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit organization that works with publishers and authors to protect the Earth’s natural resources.
More than 143 large and small U.S. publishers, 10 printers, and five paper companies have either signed the book industry’s Treatise on Responsible Paper or have environmental commitments in place with goals for increasing the use of recycled paper. Random House has taken it a step further—by upgrading to energy-efficient lightbulbs companywide and making sure that 15 percent of its energy is from wind power. The publisher has also committed to increasing its recycled fiber use tenfold—to 30,000 tons a year—by 2010.
Scholastic teamed up with the Rainforest Alliance last January to develop a formal, public paper procurement policy that would set clear objectives for the company's use of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified papers and reinforce its commitment to post-consumer waste (pcw) fiber. Scholastic also announced last March that all 12 million copies of the U.S. edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows would be printed on paper that contains a minimum of 30 percent pcw fiber. At the same time, 65 percent of the 16,700 tons of paper used in the book's first printing in the U.S. was certified by the FSC, the global standard-setter for responsible forest management.
“It’s a sign of broader shifts at large in the whole industry,” says Miller, who spoke at the Children’s Book Council’s meeting last week. “I’ve been talking about this stuff for years, but they 'get' it now. It used to take ages for me to get a meeting with these big houses, but now they’re coming to me.”
The Children’s Book Council, which supports green publishing, invited Miller as their guest speaker.
Fortunately for publishers, 80 percent of readers say they’re willing to pay more for books printed on environmentally responsible paper, compared to only 14 percent who said they were opposed to paying more, according to a study cosponsored by the Green Press Initiative, Book Business magazine, and Co-Op America, a nonprofit group that helps magazine publishers improve their environmental impact.
