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. Renard Press and SRL Publishing present a case study of how they have each assessed their ecological impact, issues they faced along the way and how they overcame them.
For more information and for tips see our Sustainability for Small Presses article.
Where did it all start for you both?
Renard: Sustainability was a key focus from our inception in April 2020, although it wasn’t quite so worked out at first (not that a sustainability policy can ever really be a finished article)! Our planning around sustainability was based on stock levels, how we supplied overseas, our utilities, etc.
Then we started by trying to assess our carbon footprint – of course, being a small press we wanted to do it ourselves rather than via an expensive agency. It was a bit of a nightmare.
Concurrently we put down a sort of credo – a set of rules to follow:
- To reduce our footprint as much as possible in current conditions
- To run as much as possible on renewables
- To switch to more eco suppliers
- To doubly offset the rest
- To use sustainable materials
- To give back to the environment by planting trees
- To join sustainability fora and communities to keep up to date on new practices
- To eradicate single-use plastics from our order processing
I suppose in a way it’s quite idealistic, but we made it work – probably because we don’t have a board to smuggle ideas past…
We did loads of research into readily available trade papers – and the Publishers Association’s Materials Matrix could have been invaluable here, were it available at the time! – and settled on some favourite papers for sustainability credentials. Artic, for instance, who make Munken Premium White – as favoured by Galley Beggar and Fitzcarraldo – are incredibly eco-conscious, paying attention to water use and sourcing and renewable energy sources; Holmen papers have a scheme of replanting the trees that have been cut down (two saplings for every tree, in fact) to produce the stuff – where it was cut down from.
And from the outset I thought we needed a way to communicate what we were doing – if half the game is about inspiring or helping others… so have worked on badging for books, and found companies that have badging to show your offsetting to communicate this.
SRL: For as long as I can remember, I’ve been incredibly conscious about what impact my words, and my actions, have on not just the people around me, but in the wider world. Cut scene to a twelve-year-old me walking up and down a windy Blackpool prom talking to people about animal testing and the fur trade, getting them to sign petitions. I even went as far as ‘creating’ (a very loose sense of the word) my own charity, called S.P.E.A.K. It stood for Stop Pet Experiments And Killings. Not quite on the same par as WWF or similar, but there we go.
Before SRL Publishing was a book publisher, it was an online magazine I had launched. We had a team of around thirty writers all contributing articles, interviews, and reviews. I was also working my way up the management chain in retail and doing both was incredibly exhausting. I had interviewed one of the dragons from Dragons Den, the Sugababes, and I was even the exclusive interviewer for Sandi Thom (remember – the punkrocker with flowers in her hair?). I remember coming home from work to find bottles of vodka outside my door, or boxes of olives, and at one point there was a cool box with a selection of vegan cheeses. The magazine grew far too quickly for me to cope with, and in a sense, I shut it down. It was only when a friend randomly said they had written a book and asked me to take a look, that I then said, ‘Sure, I’ll publish it.’
How have your sustainability efforts evolved?
Renard: There are lots of difficult conversations to have with companies where the person you’re talking to is perfectly nice and helpful, but ‘eco stuff’ is not baked in – it’s so often a different department’s problem…
We found a carbon-neutral printer (a contentious subject – but they ran on renewable energy and had an offsetting scheme in place), which was great – but they’ve since gone bust. So we’ve had to have ‘the conversation’ again and again with new printers; and at times I have to say it makes life pricier, because if a printer won’t or can’t share carbon information we feel we have to assume the worst and fall back on the industry average carbon footprint for offsetting purposes.
Of course, you also have to think about digital operations, and so we switched our website to a green host based in Amsterdam – it was a disaster. It barely loaded. We’ve now found a B Corp hipster group in east London with zero-carbon hosting (and crucially that is achieved by renewables – some shady folks out there), Krystal – and are certainly much happier!
I think like many presses we thought, ‘We want our business to do no harm to the planet – and if possible actually be a force for good’; but there’s such a steep learning curve – and learning to talk about it for fear of ‘greenwashing’ accusations is difficult. I still feel there’s a real reluctance to share information – almost like companies feel it should be private data – but if they’re in the supply chain they affect us, which affects who we supply, etc.
Plastic is posing a bit of a problem. We make, loosely speaking, recyclable products, but then dunk it in plastic, meaning it then goes to landfill instead. So what do we do about laminates – do we lose it and have uncoated covers instead? Some publishers are going this way, and it makes sense on paper (excuse the pun) but bookshops don’t love it. We use laminates for a reason, of course, and if you take it away there are no two ways about it – you’re removing a layer of protection, so the book won’t last as long. Writing today, there’s talk of recyclable laminates – they exist, but as yet haven’t become widespread enough to be an option for most presses. (It also remains to be seen what the carbon footprint is in producing them – sometimes what feels like an eco choice, e.g. recycled paper, actually has a far bigger carbon footprint, so requires careful thought.)
For us, too, being part of groups has been important, and we’re a member of the PA’s Sustainability Task Force and the IPG’s Sustainability Action Group – and I think this community, this point of knowledge sharing, has been vital; the landscape is changing every day, and they’re there to help us understand.
So there have been heaps of obstacles to overcome, but we’re now in a position where we’re planting thousands of trees – one for each time an order is placed on our website, to replace trees cut down to make our books – and we’re still doubly offsetting our footprint (through industry leading, reviewed and gold-certified schemes) to make sure that we’re giving more back to the planet than we’re taking.
Stuart: A few into our book-publishing, after really only bringing out two or three books, we published a children’s book, A Tree For Me, about a gibbon who loses his home to deforestation. This got me thinking about how we, as an incredibly small publisher, can use our voice for the greater good. We ended up partnering with Rainforest Trust, where we donated profits from this book to one of their projects. In the end, it was calculated we had saved between 500,000 and 750,000 trees from deforestation.
This got me thinking that just saving trees from deforestation isn’t enough, because trees are being cut down every second of every day all around the world. I wanted us to be as responsible as possible, so we started to look at replacing the trees used to print our products, and, of course, our emissions. We actively calculate the number of trees ‘used’ for our print products, add 15%, and use this number to ensure we’re always planting trees to replace those used. Last time I checked, we were planting 16 trees for every tree felled for our books.
After a lot of research, SRL Publishing became climate positive in June 2020, something we hadn’t originally planned to achieve. Our environmental ethos is at the heart of everything we do. Far too many books are overprinted due to publishers wanting a lower cost price, even knowing a lot of them won’t sell and will, ultimately, be destroyed.
We calculate our scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions (including digital such as emails and website data) and add 15% to ensure we have that extra headroom. The projects we’ve supported to offset our emissions, nearly 30 in 20 different countries, meet the highest verification standards and also contribute to at least one of the UN SDGs. In total, since 2020, we’ve contributed to all 17. While the trees we’ve planted do not contribute to our CO2 emissions, they’re still there quietly sucking up extra carbon.
Alongside this, we’ve been challenging and campaigning for change within the industry. We’re committed to continuous environmental improvement, and to continue growing as a business, and we’re proving you can be sustainable in both the financial and environmental sense. We’re a signatory of Publishing Declares, a member of the Ellen MacArthur Community, and members of the United Nations Publisher Compact. I’m a firm believer in that we all share this world we live on, we all have a responsibility to keep it as sustainable as possible.
ABOUT THIS ARTICLE
Last updated: 10th February 2025
Authors: Will Dady, Renard Press & Stuart Debar, SRL