The Future of Publishing is Wood-Free

The Future of Publishing is Wood-Free

The publishing world is changing, and whether in a screen or on the shelf, traditional wood-pulp paper must wave farewell.
Writers, and anyone in the publishing industry for that matter, use a lot of paper. This does not bode well for the trees. According to Hardy Green in "Pulpless Fiction" (The Business Week, June 23, 2008) an average of 30 million trees pay the price each year for our reading material. But the real environmental impact of print does not necessarily come from roots and leaves. For starters, transport emissions are surprisingly high from milling to printing to hauling books back and forth between the warehouse and the bookstore. Margo Baldwin, in "Zero-Waste Publishing" (Publishers Weekly, August 14, 2006) calculated that each book releases roughly 8.9 pounds of emission. In 2004, the gross sales of consumer books averaged a total of 188 million pounds of diesel fuel simply through transport.