Sustainability is at the top of every agenda. If it is not front and centre for every printer, it is for the industry’s customers.
This is seen in the scramble to eliminate plastic in any shape or form. The presence of plastic in packaging is acting like kryptonite on consumers. If they can choose between something wrapped in plastic and something not, the answer is obvious.
Likewise carbon is in the spotlight. Printers need to be seen to be reducing their carbon impacts in line with reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, net zero and the like. Offsetting emissions is no longer enough. Indeed questions are starting to be raised about the use of carbon offsets as a kind of guilt tax for companies that are not actually getting their house in order.
However, many are. Many have measured their Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions, those that they have direct control over, and are now turning to measuring Scope 3 emissions, which are those that come from the supply chain. And that includes printers and paper mills.
The book publishing industry is ahead in this regard. The Book Chain Project dates back to 2006 and covers mills, printers and some of the chemicals used in print. Environmental consultancy Carnstone Partners coordinates the data, including publication of a first report on the impacts from the publishing supply chain. While not extensive in terms of data from every possible mill and every possible printer, the depth of information retrieved is comprehensive in depth, covering energy, raw materials and water.
The main source of information is a questionnaire which the suppliers are asked to complete addressing policies, management systems, emissions, energy use and waste. This declares: “It allows mills and suppliers to provide information to all publishers that they are working with or who are interested in working with them in the future, by answering a single questionnaire, thereby reducing the reporting burden.” The aim is to comply with increasing demands for data aligned with the science based targets approach, which is already popular across publishers and printers that supply them – Clays and CPI, for example, have signed up for the Science Based Targets initiative.
The questionnaire aims to fill gaps in environmental statements while mills and printers are at different stages in the environmental journey, some having completed audits on emissions that help publishers calculate their Scope 3 emissions more accurately, and to guide those publishers that are not members of the Book Chain Project.
Members can access the data from the individual mills; non members can use the report to guide their calculations and choices. For example, Carnstone reports that fully integrated mills (pulp and paper making) would be expected to have higher Scope 1 and 2 emissions as they produce both pulp and paper, whereas the data for pulp is a Scope 3 figure for a non integrated mill.
In some instances, perhaps because of investment in a biomass generator or access to other renewable energy sources, the integrated mill reports a lower carbon intensity per tonne of paper.
This can range from 0.19 tonnes CO2e per tonne of paper for a semi integrated mill in Western Europe to 1.83t CO2e for a non integrated mill in India. Turning to printers, the same calculation throws up a range from 0.56t CO2e for printers in South East Asia to 0.10t CO2e for printers in Western Europe with UK printers measuring slightly better than this at 0.09t CO2e. This is due to increasing use of renewable energy sources, including onsite generation of energy.
This is grist to the mill for other publishing industry initiatives. The Localising Print Project was launched last year with plans for a report on the feasibility of bringing production of children’s and trade illustrated books back from south east Asia to the UK or Western Europe. The Publishing 2030 Accelerator has been a spin off from Canon’s Future Book Forum and takes this into a print on demand and zero inventory model for book production, by understanding and measuring the carbon footprint of a book to help publishers towards a more sustainable method of production and supply.
The concept is gaining traction among publishers aware that waste levels can be as high as 30% for some titles and that the lowest unit cost per book is not necessarily reflective of its total cost when warehousing, shipments and other invisible costs are included.
This requires a cultural shift among publishers and possibly a business shift as well if books held in warehouses are considered as assets with a financial value waiting to be realised. Print on demand might damage balance sheets.
But it will happen. The book buying public wants ethical and sustainably produced books, and smaller publishers in particular are reacting. The Independent Publishers Guild has 600 smaller publisher members with a combined turnover amounting to £1.1 billion. Some are larger traditional publishers like Cambridge University Press. Others are kitchen stable start ups by knowledgeable people that have left larger companies for any number of reasons.
“We provide the connection and assets to help members do better business,” says its chief executive Bridget Shine. That ranges from staging conferences to striking deals with Amazon. And it covers sustainability of production “how you print and how you ship” she says. A representative from Extinction Rebellion spoke at one of the conferences. “And I came away thinking we had to do more,” Shine says.
That led to the creation of a sustainability action group and in turn to the localising print project. It is currently a data gathering exercise, working with Carnstone’s resources to produce data around book production from the paper at the start of the process to delivery of finished books, mapping printing in China against a print on demand model. A number of children’s book publishers have pledged their support as have Clays, CPI and HP.
“As a trade association we are very particular that we want things that we can measure. We don’t want to be a talking shop,” she says.
That has led to expression as five targets that have been widely shared beyond the immediate members, into print and distribution in one direction, to the Society of Authors in the other. The idea is to instigate change in how people think. And onshoring print is one of those targets.
It is a big ask in the chosen sectors. When Integraf carried out a survey last year it struggled to find anyone in Europe with the capacity to produce board books that introduce the youngest to the idea of books, let alone a company that produced these titles regularly. Illustrated children’s books are more straightforward, but those with interactive elements, flaps, pop ups and so on, have a high labour element to them.
This is without question a challenging issue. For decades limited pagination, full coverage colour, hard cover books have been printed in China. Capacity for Asterix style cartoon books exists in mainland Europe, but since the demise of Ladybird and Purnells, the UK has had little by way of specialist volume book production to offer.
But it does exist. Severnprint produces a number of children’s titles, including the environmentally themed Greta and the Giants. Halstan Press has produced children’s books for Ukrainian refugees. Pureprint and Charlesworth produce low pagination hard cover highly personalised children’s books. The coming wave of inkjet web presses will expand the opportunity for printing colour books on demand and children’s publishing is an ideal place to start.
The initial report to the IPG is due this year and will examine what are the real barriers to producing books in the UK and Europe rather than China. Those findings will be widely shared across the ‘community of interest’ in books. “We want to know how printers are able to produce books differently,” she says. That bodes well for digital print not only of mono books but also colour books and a switch from a long distance transport model under print and distribute to distribute and print.
Outside of the IPG networks are being formed, led by Ingram Spark’s model of distributed printing and emulated by other printers and publishers. The concept is proven. The scale may be missing, let alone some of the issues around rights in different countries.
Within the IPG sustainability measures also include the Book Journeys project to map the typical production path for six book types which is being extended to look at returns, waste and pulping of unsold books and the Zero Carbon Toolkit to help those smaller publishers consider reductions in their footprints.
There is certainly a growing desire to be more sustainable. In an article for The Bookseller, micro publisher Richard Charkin says: “When I founded Mensch Publishing, I determined to use the business to test out different ways of doing things.”
One of those was the production method for a conventional trade book. That involved working with Ingram Spark to use its production network to print close to the point of sale, and to print only when a sale had been made. It has worked: “The unit cost of each book is higher, probably near double the cost of a, say, 3000-copy print run — but there are immense savings in freight and general distribution, not to mention CO2 emissions and the destruction of unsold or returned copies,” he says, adding: “Support from the book trade has been close to zero.”
That must and will change. The book publishing industry has been around for centuries and change does not come overnight. Like the saying about the armed forces: The air force has habits, the army has customs and the Royal Navy has traditions, traditions take a long time to dissolve.
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