Green 2.0

Way, way back in early 2008, our sister magazine Book Business ran a long cover story (which I wrote) on efforts by publishers to go green. Back then, everyone in the industry, from New York executives to Canadian paper mills, was talking about ways to reduce their carbon footprint. Publishers were making commitments to increase use of recycled and lightweight paper, paying close attention to global sourcing, launching sites to educate kids and consumers about green practices and pushing corporate initiatives to switch out bulbs, carpool more and use less paper. For a while it felt like the story in publishing, a way for companies to burnish their image while demonstrating they were growing responsibly. Then came the great recession. After the economy fell apart in late 2008, one barely heard a peep about environmental issues. Talk turned to survival, righting the ship, retooling practices and moving forward amid rapid technological change. Companies worried about Apple, Amazon, Flipboard and Borders; there was little time or resources to devote to green initiatives. The idea of green as a publishing priority seemed dead as the dodo. Lately, though, things have been picking up. With Hurricane Sandy, the Midwest drought and the hottest year on record in 2012, climate change is making itself hard to ignore. The recent controversy over Paperless 2013—a campaign to eliminate office paper use sponsored by the likes of Google Drive, HelloFax and Manilla (a bill management service owned by Hearst)—has rekindled the debate over whether print or electronic communication is the greener option. The New York Times reported in September what many already suspected: the servers and data centers supporting cloud-based media suck up massive amounts of power and can be hugely wasteful. To enable our document sharing, video streaming and music storing, data warehouses use an estimated 30 billion watts of electricity worldwide, the Times reported, much of which originates from coal-fired power plants. The French Agency for the Environment and Energy Management (ADEME) calculates the carbon impact of a year of emailing as equivalent to three round-trip flights from Paris to New York. A report from the Green Press Initiative on the environmental impact of e-books points up the need for e-reader recycling programs, a reduction in toxic components in manufacturing and transparency regarding lifecycle impacts. What all this points to is a confluence of trends: a growing economy paired with a growing realization that we have not fully come to grips with the impact of the digital device revolution—which, at little more than five years old, is exploding worldwide. As with other facets of publishing, where we go from here on the pathway to sustainability is uncertain, but will surely look very different from where we were in those early days of 2008. With that in mind, I offer a few near-term predictions for environmental initiatives in publishing. Paper and Forests A slowing Asian economy and move away from print will lessen the impact of forest practices, though these will remain vitally important to the green equation. With most major-publisher sustainability initiatives now a few years old, large corporations such as Time Inc. and Hearst will need to update and refresh their corporate responses to issues like climate change and deforestation. Attention will continue to be paid to paper sourcing and production as a major contributor to CO2 impacts. In 2011, Scholastic increased its 2012 sustainable paper procurement goal for Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified paper, originally set in 2008, from 30 to 35 percent. In January 2013, TC Transcontinental announced it was expanding its own paper purchasing policy for TC Media products, using only recycled or certified paper and giving preference to suppliers that monitor their own reduction of environmental impacts. Expect more incremental steps like these from a fragile industry, rather than major policy or workflow overhauls. Energy and Efficiency As alternative sources of electricity, such as solar and wind, continue to expand, publishers and printers will increase their use of sustainable energy and further efforts at internal conservation, following in the footsteps of Hearst Corporation, whose New York City headquarters earned LEED gold and platinum certifications in 2012. Digital Dimensions The most important green initiatives in the next few years will come on the digital front as publishers look to participate in media industry efforts to lower the impact of electronic devices and storage. Facebook and Google have announced hardware and software redesigns to make their data centers more efficient, but much more will have to be done and pressure brought to bear on stakeholders to reduce the impact of data management (even as consumers gripe about the least interruption to their Netflix stream). Server consolidation, hardware improvements, end-user conservation and use of sustainable energy for data centers will be important to these efforts. Recently, Apple has publicized an internal initiative to generate onsite renewable energy at its data server sites, including building what it says are the nation's largest private solar arrays near its facility in Maiden, N.C. Solar power was expected to meet 60 percent of this center's power needs by 2013, with the rest coming from purchasing renewable energy. PE

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Green 2.0

James Sturdivant

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James Sturdivant