Green Reference
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
Last year, when I was working on the 2008 Reference Books Bulletin Encyclopedia Update, I noticed that World Book Encyclopedia came with a Mixed Sources label from the Forest Stewardship Council, meaning “wood comes from FSC certified well managed forests, company controlled sources and/or recycled material.” Ever since then I’ve been looking for evidence of green in other reference books. I haven’t seen more Mixed Sources labels, but many reference books are printed on acid free paper. The 2009 World Book is printed on acid-free recycled paper “with a minimum of 20 percent pose-consumer recovered fiber.” The new five-volume Berkshire Encyclopedia of China is printed on 30% 
postconsumer recycled paper, not surprising given Berkshire’s commitment to sustainability. In fact, they have a 10-volume Encyclopedia of Sustainability coming out over the next months. Another Encyclopedia of Sustainability is due out from Greenwood in December.
Berkshire’s printer, Thomson-Shore, is a member or the Green Press Initiative, the goal of which is “to help those in the book and newspaper industries better understand their impacts on endangered forests, indigenous communities, and the Earth’s climate. ” The numbers for one reference set like Berkshire Encyclopedia of China–138 trees saved by the publisher’s paper choice, not to mention 12,219 pounds of greenhouse gases, 50,717 gallons of wastewater, and 6,513 pounds of solid waste–are pretty staggering. There’s a lesson here for all of us who are sorry to see the reference book become an extinct species–paperless reference is just more green.
July 30th, 2009 at 11:21 am
Many thanks for raising this issue and giving the numbers. For reasons of space – and the complexity of the subject – I didn’t get into the environmental impact of e-publishing in the Encyclopedia of China. But reading online is not a carbon-free activity and neither is publishing online.
I chaired the first Green Data Centres Conference in London in 2008 and was stunned to learn that our use of computers requires more energy than the global aviation industry. Because computer use is growing, this is a huge future challenge. And it’s not just a question of carbon footprint. One of our authors wrote the other day to explain, “The imminent crisis is the growing expense and growing difficulty of supplying water (to give you an idea, it takes 24,000 gallons per day to dissipate the heat produced by a 1 megawatt data center) to data centers. This could cripple IT.” We’re covering this in detail in Volume 2 of the Encyclopedia of Sustainability: The Business of Sustainability (November 2009).
As Berkshire puts more reference content online, we’ll be looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint and toxic waste impact. As libraries turn to online reference databases, e-books, and other e-resources, they too will need to be asking hard questions about environmental impact.
“E-“ does not equal “eco-”!