The latest report about the publishing industry doesn’t compile sales figures, track the market for fiction or lament the future of reading. It does tell a great deal about books — not what they say, but what they’re made of.
“Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts” is an 86-page summary, printed on 50 percent post-consumer recycled paper and full of charts about fiber, endangered forests and carbon footprints. The news: The book world, which uses up more than 1.5 million metric tons of paper each year, is steadily, if not entirely, finding ways to make production greener.
Books and paper in general
The key number in that item–that books use about 1.5 million tons of paper worldwide–led me to do a tiny bit of informal research. Which reveals, as I always thought but had never verified, that books represent almost none of the demand for paper.
To wit: The U.S. uses roughly 100 million tons of paper and paperboard per year (over half of it recycled, incidentally)–including about 600,000 tons for books.
Europe uses about 95 million tons of paper and paperboard (about 48% recycled).
So, just between the U.S. and Europe, there’s considerably more than 100 times as much paper/paperboard used as is used worldwide for books.
So, if you want to conserve forests (noting that tropical forests aren’t even useful for paper products–the big problem there is locals burning down the trees to create agricultural land), getting rid of print books probably isn’t a logical place to start.