Introducing the GBA Publisher-Printer Sustainability Checklist

After lengthy consultations with publishers and printers in Canada, the UK and the US, we are happy to make our Printer-Publisher Sustainability Checklist available. The checklist can be viewed online and downloaded from the GBA website.

The checklist aims to help foster discussions between publishers and printers around environmental sustainability in manufacturing books. The checklist was produced in a Q&A format to represent sustainability questions that publishers are asking of printers and how printers might answer those questions.

A special thanks to all the publishers and printers that participated in developing this checklist.

GBA Sustainability Series: An introduction to your carbon footprint

On January 12th, 2023, The Green Book Alliance held a webinar introducing Scope 1, 2, and 3 Greenhouse Gas Emissions as part of its Sustainability Series. A recording and presentation slides are available below.

As the book publishing industry works to embrace sustainability and manage its carbon footprint, most companies are learning first-hand about how their emissions contribute to their unique carbon footprint. To reduce an organization’s carbon footprint and impact climate change, each firm must understand and measure its greenhouse gas emissions. But what emissions do various companies control, and how do we measure when responsibility may reside somewhere else in the supply chain?

The Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHG Protocol) divides emissions into three scopes: Scope 1 emissions (direct emissions from sources owned or controlled by a company); Scope 2 emissions (indirect emissions from purchased electricity, steam, heat, and cooling); and Scope 3 emissions (all other emissions associated with a company’s activities). In this webinar, a panel of sustainability veterans will discuss the three scopes, explain where to look and how to estimate emissions and share stories of their sustainability journeys.

Panellists included:

Courtney Ward-Hunting (Senior Sustainability Production Manager), Penguin Random House U.K.

Liam Conway, Vice President Advisory Services, carbonzero, Canada

Liam Conway's slides	Carbonzero Slides
Courtney Ward-Hunting's slides	Penguin Random House UK Slides

Decarbonising digital

Decarbonising digital is an article on Mygreenpod.com, and looks at the carbon footprint of digital products and how they are not zero. It talks about how as we want things faster and newer devices we are driving the footprint higher.

The article also gives examples on how much CO2e is generated from certain videos on YouTube, and how many trees would need to be planted to offset that. The figures are staggering!

Click on the following link to take you to the article.

Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash