By 2025, publishing companies from Condé Nast to Oxford University Press aim to become carbon neutral, utilise 100% certified sustainable paper and reduce landfill waste to zero (OUP, 2022). Houses and organisations across the industry have released such environmental policies and statements of their implementation strategies for sustainable sourcing techniques. The problem is, however, the disconnect between companies within the industry. A lack of unity and cohesion across the industry is slowing down effective, collective action in favour of the environment. A mutually shared goal should be just as important as an independent one, if not imperative, and, in this case, is required to increase social and environmental impact.
In terms of practical solutions to climate change and reducing carbon footprint, which is the ultimate goal, major companies must take the initiative by depending on recycled, ethically sourced, and more durable materials as opposed to cheap processes for the production of mass-market paperbacks, for instance. A way to accomplish this may be the commitment of all organisations within the publishing industry to source 100% Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper (FSC), a technique that is currently majorly employed to ensure biodiversity and the renewability of harvested trees. Unsustainable and low-quality modes of publishing should not be a quick fix to the issue of cost, affordability, or economic disparities within society.
When it comes to the debate surrounding the sustainability of print, specifically in comparison to digitalisation, it is mostly presumed that the physical mode is more harmful to the planet and that published works would cause less risk if circulated in digital format. Yet, we may fail to notice the unsustainable and unethical means by which materials are extracted for electronics and the additional consumption of energy that fuels these resources and, in turn, exhausts the planet. Not only does digitalisation have more strongly undesirable environmental effects, but the labour also required for it is usually exploitative of workers in poverty and danger. Along with this, economic disparities have caused a digital divide, and the lack of affordability of electronic resources and books makes it unrealistic that the digitisation of print is preferable for social and environmental sustainability and accessibility.
Some of the smallest yet increasingly impactful acts of justice in favour of the planet’s safety have been triggered by the notion of solidarity within a community. From the growing existential threat of climate change have emerged systems within communities following the ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ concepts. For example, the Little Free Library organisation scatters mini libraries across villages, towns and even cities like Edinburgh, offering free books to the public, with space to share one’s own. Though this is not as widely popular across the United Kingdom as it is in America, it has certainly begun to promote environmentalist communities and neighbourhoods within towns and villages in the UK as well as the city of Edinburgh itself. Small yet powerful and unifying forms of sustainably circulated literature, such as mini libraries, symbolise steps closer towards the collective action required by the public to increase the demand for sustainable modes of consuming literature.
Recently, the notion of appreciation for second-hand, vintage, pre-loved and collectable items, including books and physical forms of media, for the sake of sustaining and protecting tangible goods, has become widely common and desirable. With this cultural shift must come a responsible publishing industry, acceptant and entitled to paving the way for the needs of the modern buyer, keeping in mind the necessity of accessibility as well as rotational and recyclable modes of consuming literature.
Societies are developing, and the environment is suffering, yet its inhabitants are demanding, and with this, the actions of those within the publishing industry are slowly aligning yet not with one another. For there to remain hope and reliability in sustainable methods of print, leading publishing companies and the elements of service within them – the author, the resource supplier, and the bookshop owner – must cooperate with one another through value and through practice to ensure a mutual goal as the single entity which they constitute.
Image Credit: “Bookshop” by DesheBoard is licensed under CC BY 2.0.