What Penguin are doing to help reduce a books carbon footprint - Green Penguin

�Climate change is worth fighting� George Monbiot, Heat

What We Can Do To Help

The process of making a book, like all manufacturing, leads to a carbon footprint - a measure of the amount of greenhouse emissions from any given activity.

So what creates a book's carbon footprint?

In 2006 Penguin published, through its hardback imprint Hamish Hamilton, Kiran Desai's Booker Award-winning The Inheritance of Loss. Let's follow the book through the publishing process.

1) Publishing begins with the receipt and editing of manuscripts and thus involves heating, lighting, paper, computers, telephones, air conditioning etc. - the kind of energy intensive equipment and processes that every modern office should be trying to tackle.

2) Trees are chopped down, debarked and pulped (these days many are grown explicitly for this purpose), then transported by road, rail or boat to the printer.

3) The printer creates the final book and transports copies to the publisher's warehouse, where the books are then distributed by road to bookshops across the UK.

Each book's footprint is different, depending on factors such as whether the paper came from sustainably managed forests, whether the paper is glossy or matt, and whether any copies are flown or shipped to foreign countries.

But to give a rough idea, a 500-page paperback (such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth) will typically account for around 2.5 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per copy.

Over the course of a year there are 130,000 titles published in the UK, which generally means over 240 million books are printed. The sums speak for themselves.

So what can we at Penguin do to reduce our impact on the environment?

» Making our Books Green with the FSC