THE INDIE PRESS NETWORK GUIDE

Sustainability for Small Presses

← Return to contents

Sustainability has become a key area of focus for many industries, and for small presses it can be hard to know where to start, particularly when information can be hard to get hold of. For this article two of the UK’s first climate-positive presses, Renard Press and SRL Publishing, present a case study of how they have assessed their ecological impact.

Case studies
Read case studies from Renard Press and SRL Publishing about their climate-positive journeys – where it began, problems that arose, how they were overcome.

Extrapolating from these case studies, the below might be some key areas of focus for small presses who are keen to assess their climate impact.

Materials – paper and trees

Is it bad to be in an industry cutting down trees? Well, according to TAPPI (The Leading Technical Association for the Worldwide Pulp, Paper and Converting Industry), about a third of raw materials used to make paper is ‘residue’ (i.e. uses sawmill scraps that would otherwise be wasted), and trees felled for the industry are often a part of healthy forest management – so it’s not all bad!

The majority of popular trade papers used in the UK have high sustainability credentials; but presses should ask their printer for guidance. With the name of the mill and paper it should be easy enough to find fact sheets online with information on the paper and the company producing it.

Most will be no alien to the FSC® certification logo, and the papers used by UK book printers should be FSC certified – but your printer will be able to confirm. Note that some retailers have requirements for FSC badging on books; but printers need to be subscribed for you to use the logo.

How many trees have been cut down to make your books? This is a difficult one to answer for many reasons – not least that not all mills are equal, papers come in different weights, sizes, etc. – but TAPPI give an estimate that ‘a cord of wood’ would equate to around 942 100-page hardback books, were they to be made of 100% virgin hardwood, which, of course, many aren’t. Nonetheless, this gives an interesting starting point for thinking about your list.

But also into the mix: many mills manage their own forests, and some replant trees. If you’re producing a ‘bog standard’ paperback in the UK, you might well be using a Holmen book wove, for instance, who replant at least two saplings for each tree cut down.

‘As a sustainable forest company, we let the forest grow and give. For every tree we harvest, we plant two more trees and each year we produce more than 35 million seedlings. During the last 100 years the volume of the Swedish forest has more than doubled.’
– Holmen

(It’s worth noting that Holmen are not alone in this, and in fact Sweden require all logged areas to be replanted – Google your preferred paper and be prepared to be amazed!)

In recent years many authors have been pushing for publishers to commit to using recycled paper only, citing the felling of trees – e.g. ‘The book industry fells billions of trees – it’s down to authors to demand to be printed on recycled paper’ (Independent). Presses should certainly consider their paper options carefully – but it’s worth researching the paper to find out more. Also worth the time is the PA’s Materials Matrix, which gives benchmarks and rough information on types of paper – e.g. water use or average carbon comparison for virgin papers vs. recycled papers. It’s not always so clear-cut, and in fact sometimes what sounds like it must be the ‘eco option’ can have a higher carbon footprint.

Also pertinent to this section, of course, is the idea of using less. Much fuss has been made in recent years about a newly designed font that can turn a 400-page tome into a neat, cheap and eco 280-pager (numbers for illustrative purposes only). While eco fonts have been around for a while, and it’s certainly worth considering and playing around with, it does have to balance with the ‘books as beautiful objects’ conversation – is the trade-off undercutting the beauty of the typesetting? If you do indeed want to shave some pages off the extent, speak to your typesetter – it’s likely they will be able to shave off 5–10% without sacrificing much of the book’s beauty (and if the spine width is important to you, maybe a shorter extent and slightly thicker paper will be a more eco choice – speak to your printer).

Materials – plastic

A hot topic across all industries in the 2020s is plastic – where has it sneaked into? You might be surprised, looking at a paperback book – made of paper, surely? – to hear that it’s riddled with plastic.

As the PA’s Materials Matrix will show you, plastic has a knack of getting into all sorts of places where you might not expect to find it. If you’re aiming to make a recyclable or biodegradable product, you’ll need to check with your printer about their inks, glues, laminates.

If you’re just aiming to take more of a wide approach and cut down the prevalence of single-use plastics in your operation, your chief starting point is likely to be the cover: foils and laminates.

Foils are very unlikely to be what they claim – they’re usually plastic-based, and any ‘negative space’ in the design is wasted – so it’s perhaps worth wondering whether the book needs foil – after all, it’s jolly expensive too. You might in the end decide that it does need the foil, and that’s a valid decision – but it’s important to think about.

Laminates are a contentious point – it’s becoming trendier and trendier (thanks, sure, in no small part to trendsetters like Fitzcarraldo and Galley Beggar) to drop the laminate on covers and have a tactile, uncoated surface. This certainly means you’re using acres less single plastic – not a bad idea, perhaps! But a few down sides to think about: without a plastic protective covering, will the book last as long – and if not, is this creating a new problem, building in obsolescence; and perhaps most important for small presses – if you’re using digital toner presses for your covers, rather than litho ink on substrate, is the colour so dark (or, in printer terms, is the ‘ink coverage so high’) that it’ll create a sort of half-gloss effect that you haven’t intended? Again, it’s a tough decision, and for many laminates are there for a good reason.

Printing methods

More of an organisational decision is printing – how many, where, how. Thanks to the advances of digital printing it’s likely that, if you’re reading this page as a small press, you’re likely using digital rather than litho printing for the majority of your list. (You can have this conversation with your printer, and it’ll change from place to place, but the printers addressing the Indie Press Network at the British Library Cabaret Day in November 2024 agreed a 2,000–3,000 copy run was the threshold to make it the economical choice to switch from digital to litho printing.)

Why does this matter? Well, in previous decades publishers’ only real option was litho printing – which, due to high set-up costs, means printing in the thousands, and therefore, inevitably, a higher amount of waste. Speak to your printer about their mid-run pricing – to quote a print rep from the Cabaret Day, ‘For us there’s no real cost difference between a run of 500 copies and two runs of 250 copies.’ In which case, it might be worth not overcommitting and therefore in some cases having to pulp the book – after all, those are trees that have been cut down, plastic added, bits recycled, and where not, water wasted and ‘forever chemicals’ thrown about.

How do you measure your carbon footprint?

There’s no easy answer here – it takes some work. You can, of course, pay a company to assess your carbon footprint for you, but bear in mind this comes at a cost. There are plenty of free tools on the website for individuals, which can help to an extent for calculating things like business trips, and for the book industry specifically the Publishers Association has launched a carbon calculator which you might find useful (free with membership of the PA or IPG). For some, a range of free tools and a nicely put-together spreadsheet might be the answer.

Take some time looking into the basics – what is covered in scope 1, 2, 3 emissions – and think about how this affects your press. For most small presses there will be some small consideration of energy use in the office/home office, but the vast majority will be in the production of books.

As we write, most printers will be able to give you a lot of information on their sustainability practice and policy, but often they will struggle to communicate carbon figures, as carbon accounting is not yet widespread or mandated. However, you can go into conversations armed with industry research – on the one hand, a comprehensive piece of research showed (with assumptions highlighted) the benchmark for a book’s lifetime carbon emissions to be 1.2KG of carbon. This might sound a lot, but use it as a fallback figure and look at how you beat this.

It’s thought that around 65% of a book’s carbon footprint is in production, while 25% is in transport and 10% is in packaging; talk to your printer about how they see their part in this – if they’re entirely powered by renewables and are subscribed to the Carbon Balanced Paper scheme, it’s suddenly looking a bit merrier.

Since transport is such a big part of the game, it’s certainly worth thinking about this too. Does your distributor operate a ‘responsible delivery’ scheme? If you have an e-commerce site, how do you post books? Royal Mail currently claim to have one of the lowest carbon footprints in the UK, at 200g per parcel; research your preferred courier – how do they compare? What about international post – do you send books via airmail? Could you perhaps mitigate some of this footprint by printing, where possible, on demand closer to the recipient?

‘Don’t forget digital’ – three terrifying words. How do we assess the impact of tweets Xed, newsletters sent, Tiks Tokked? Google will be your friend here – keep a note each year of your total grams/tweets, note the difference and multiply by the platform’s latest published carbon-footprint-per-post value. Depending on your newsletter software, you might have this information at your fingertips. Indie Press Net, for instance, used Bravo (formerly SendInBlue), and there’s a handy carbon footprint report you can open from the menu.

A note on carbon offsetting

At the end of all this, if you’re keen to become carbon neutral, it’s also important think carefully about how you’re offsetting your carbon footprint. While it’s tempting to choose an £8/ton scheme you find on Google, this is likely not to be very helpful in the long run. On the other hand, if you hire a consultant you’ll likely hear them tell you morosely that schemes aren’ worth the paper they’re written on if they cost less than £50/ton – and there’s some truth to this. But carbon offsetting has come on leaps and bounds in the last few years alone; look for Gold-certified schemes that use language like ‘carbon removal’ rather than ‘avoidance’, and yes, they’re probably more likely in the £30+/ton bracket.

Also bear in mind, if this is scary, that minimising your footprint is always better than offsetting. If it’s a scary figure, sit with it and look at how you can reduce it – a more eco printer? Renewable electricity for the office? A new website host? A more eco courier? etc.

How do you communicate your eco work?

Putting aside very obvious attempts of greenwashing (NB changing your logo from red to green while supporting deforestation isn’t a great look), it’s important to communicate about your sustainability efforts – not only to demonstrate to your readers that they’re supporting an eco-minded company, but to encourage others and knowledge-share. It seems like it’s each press for themselves, but it shouldn’t be.

Both Renard Press and SRL Publishing explain in their case studies that they plant trees; for presses that choose to do so, it’s a good idea to use a platform/company that holds itself accountable – if you’re paying them to plant trees on your behalf, make sure you’ve got a portal that your readers can visit to see your forest and find out more. For instance, you can check in on Renard here and SRL here (they both use Ecologi, where you can pay as you go, but there are other services available).

Resources

 

ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
Last updated: 10th February 2025
Authors: Will Dady, Renard Press with Stuart Debar, SRL