Environmentalists will be delighted by the developments in publishing this month, not just because of the opportunity to buy myriad new books on calculating carbon emissions and understanding climate change, but because Hachette, who control 17% of the book market and own Hodder Headline, Orion, Little Brown and Octopus, have committed to a policy of environmental paper sourcing.
Hachette, who had been described by Greenpeace forest campaigner, Belinda Fletcher, as “the Grinch when it comes to using ancient forest friendly paper” have enrolled in a scheme spearheaded by children’s publisher Egmont to allow publishers to track the source of the pulp which constitutes their paper. Preps (Publishers’ database for Responsible Environmental Paper Sourcing), which has also been joined by HarperCollins, Penguin, Usborne and Walker, will record and rate every paper used by members, helping them to improve their purchasing policies.
Egmont are to be congratulated on their pioneering efforts in this area. For several years they have been at the avant-garde of environmental and ethical publishing and, having implemented a complex paper grading system with the help of a team of environmental consultants, they can now claim that they know where every single tree comes from that goes into every paper that makes up every book.
This may sound elementary but it has been no easy task. Paper is made by mixing various pulps which can be derived from forests across the globe. The process of pinpointing every source has been described by Egmont as an “enormous undertaking” that has taken three years to approach completion and demanded a total overhaul of their manufacturing process. Still, the results are laudable; Michael Morpurgo’s book Kensuke’s Kingdom, published by Egmont, was the first book in the country ever to have both the text and jacket paper approved by the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council). As the author very rightly comments, “What is the point of enhancing our imagination and intellect, while we poison the planet?”
And here, with the authors, is where the real pressure behind the recent push for environmentally conscious paper sourcing lies. “We would never buy paper made from dead bears, otter, salmon and birds, from ruined native cultures, from destroyed species and destroyed lives, from ancient forests reduced to stumps and mud; but that’s what we’re buying when we buy paper made from old-growth clear-cut trees”, comments Margaret Atwood, whose The Tent (Bloomsbury) is published on recycled paper and who, along with 90 other authors, supports Greenpeace’s Book Campaign.
It was 2003 when Greenpeace published their damning report on the inadvertent role that UK publishing was playing in deforestation. The report specified not only that the industry was fuelling the destruction of ancient forest regions in Finland and Canada but that paper was sourced from Russia, where half of logging is estimated to be illegal. Most shockingly the practice, particularly common among illustrated and children’s publishers, of printing titles in southeast Asia was implicated as a cause of the continuing destruction of Indonesian rainforest.
Through Greenpeace’s efforts and with the support of a pressure campaign from authors, publishing houses have significantly stepped up their efforts with forty percent having introduced “green” policies in the last eighteen months. An increasing number of books are now printed on recycled or FSC certified paper, including Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (Random House), Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother (Random House) and Bernard Cornwall’s Sharpe’s Fury (Harper Collins) with Random House this month becoming the first publisher to print its entire mass-market paperback list on FSC certified paper.
Penguin Books have gone one step further, contributing significant funding to a Woodlands Trust initiative to transform 96 acres of land at Botany Bay, South Derbyshire into forest. The first of 40,000 trees in what has become known as “Penguin Wood” was planted last week by chief executive John Makinson.
Until now Hachette had been Greenpeace’s nemesis in the crusade for a greener publishing industry. Refusing to meet with representatives and declining to make available to interested parties a copy of its paper procurement policy, Hachette had commented, with cynicism, that its procurement policy was “extremely similar to that of the more enlightened of our competitors.”
Whether down to author pressure or a genuine acknowledgement of environmental responsibility the change in attitude of this giant of the publishing world is certainly a coup for Greenpeace and the Book Campaign. The frontier will no doubt shift now towards smaller publishing houses, where margins are narrower and authors have less clout.
Perhaps in time those magic three letters, FSC, will hold the marketing power that the soil association logo now has in the groceries trade and make the overheads of greener publishing justifiable for smaller companies. Or maybe the real future for green publishing lies in recent developments in ebook technology and digital proliferation. Whatever the future for publishing, this enlightened decision brings the industry one step closer to sustainability.
