School of Sustainability

The sustainable book began as one difficult print run

Piers Torday's problem was embarrassingly direct: he was writing books about climate change while the object itself depended on felled trees, surplus stock and the energy of pulping what did not sell. The webinar Page to Planet, facilitated by Graciela Melitsko Thornton for Julie's Bicycle, kept returning to that contradiction rather than to grand sector language. Roughly one tree for every 25 printed books is the sort of ratio that can sound abstract until returns come back from the warehouse and are destroyed.

Torday's answer was not a manifesto first but a print run. He pressed his publisher to make The Wild Before a pilot for a fully sustainable book: recycled paper, vegetable-based inks, seed bookmarks, and no plastic varnishes or finishes that defeat recycling. The point was not that one title could clean up publishing, but that a publisher could be made to show its workings on a single book, with authors then organised through the Society of Authors' sustainability network, the Independent Publishers Guild panel and a Sustainable Story Award.

Around that pilot sat a set of unglamorous levers. Use lighter paper and tighter typography where the book can bear it. Prefer print-on-demand to speculative bulk printing when demand is uncertain. Treat libraries, schools and book-sharing schemes as infrastructure that keeps one physical copy in use for years rather than months. And measure properly: the UK Publishing Declares pledge and standardised carbon calculators were described as ways to replace warm intention with comparable numbers, with local printing named as the change that would make supply chains visibly different.

The library strand gave the argument a building. After COP26 exposed the lack of a common plan, the Green Libraries Campaign launched in 2022; CILIP, the British Library and partners then secured £1.2 million from the National Lottery Community Fund for ten Green Library Hubs across the UK from 2025 to 2028, with Julie's Bicycle leading training. Maja Maricevic's case was that libraries already exist almost everywhere, so they can act as climate shelters and civic rooms without pouring new carbon into construction - though digital demand and AI now bring an energy bill of their own.

Julie's Bicycle · Read the source