The Forest Stewardship Council is a non-profit organization established in 1993 to promote responsible management of the world’s forests. FSC sets several standards that must be covered in order to achieve the eco-friendly label and certification.
An industry that uses a lot of forest resources is the publishing industry. Paper pastry is extracted from wood in order to make books. Therefore, several publishing houses have noticed the importance to develop their products being conscious about the environment.
In this post I will focus on the biggest publishing house in the world, Penguin Random House. PRH operates in worldwide markets divided in three: US and Canada, UK and Spain and LATAM.
Penguin has set the goal that by 2020, 100% of their books will be produced with sustainable paper. Currently, 98% of books in the UK market are labeled by FSC and the percentage is similar in the Spanish market.
PRH Grupo Editorial (Spain and Latin America) will promote the FSC label by including it in all the books that use sustainable paper. This will give brand awareness on sustainability and notoriety. PRH follows the FSC standards all along their value chain: acquiring paper pastry from sustainable forests, using nontoxic inks and recycling books if they have to be destroyed because they haven’t been sold.
PRH Grupo Editorial has an imprint called DEBOLSILLO, which literally means in pocket. These books are intended to be practical to be carried since they are light, and they have a lower price than hard-covers. These books are the paperbacks or softcovers. Currently, PRH is looking into developing the first imprint that uses 100% recycled paper. They are intending to sell the books at the same price so that price doesn’t affect the customers.
However, everything is not good news. In some markets PRH is struggling to keep the standards of FSC. For instance, in LATAM finding responsible forest providers that could cope with the groups demand is hard. It is about time that some FSC provider who can cover PRH demand appears and all the books that Penguin Random House produces will be ecofriendly!
For one of the largest publishers to commit to using 100% sustainable paper sources by 2020 is a very noble task. It’s great that organizations such as the Forest Stewardship Council have taken the stance of improving our treatment of forests without profit in mind – according to the WWF, we’re losing the equivalent of 27 soccer fields every minute! This is definitely not sustainable. If this issue doesn’t see improvement shortly, I’m afraid we may find ourselves in a terrible situation in the future.