By Shyama Mohini Devi Dasi
on behalf of the BBT Marketing, Communications and Innovations Department
To make our books green we are keen on using paper made from controlled, sustainable forestry practices, and working with printers who use environmentally friendly inks, varnishes, and manufacturing processes.
While it’s not yet possible to make every book we print completely green (it’s more difficult when we print in Asia, for example), most of our books are FSC-certified. It’s no small thing to get an FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) stamp. These days, the FSC requires that 99 percent of the materials to create a book come from controlled, sustainable, and accredited forests, containing no genetically modified trees.
Because Sweden, Finland, and Germany are the European exemplars when it comes to environmental policy, we try to ensure that almost all of the cellulose from which the paper for our books is made comes from Sweden or Finland. It’s the cleanest in the world. There is more forest now in Scandinavia than there was fity years ago. This is because Scandinavians consider their forests “green gold,” and they replant more trees than they fell. We also try to ensure that the paper we buy has been manufactured in environmentally responsible ways. For example, we always opt for TCF (totally chlorine-free) paper – paper bleached with oxygen rather than elemental (and dioxin-producing) chlorine. Similarly, we aim for solvent-free inks, and, for all our hardbound and larger softbound books, water-based binding glues. For our smaller books, we are still required to use the less environment-friendly hotmelt glue, because the technology for a better choice does not yet exist. (There is a lot of research on glues, however, and a better option will likely be available in the not-too-distant future.)
We also have to consider how best to protect the inks on our book covers from being rubbed off during handling, and we do this through some sort of varnishing or lamination. We rarely use UV varnish anymore, and prefer either foil lamination – the nicest, because it doesn’t show figerprints and it makes a cover almost untearable – or print varnish, which is water-based and biodegradable. Print varnish is not as shiny as UV varnish or foil lamination, but it is an attractive option. If you’ve seen the cover of one of our super-popular titles, Chant and Be For more details on FSC certification: https://www.fsc.org/ Happy, done with print varnish, you’ll know that we no longer need environmentally hazardous varnishing technologies to make a book look attractive.
Aside from materials, we ensure that the European printers we work with are EMAS-certified. The EMAS is the environmental protection agency of Europe, and they send inspectors into printing houses to check efflnce, the levels of air pollution the printing house is generating, and the printing house’s energy consumption. When the printing house reaches acceptable levels, it becomes EMAS-certified.
For example, for decades offset printers used an alcohol-water mix on the printing plates. This means they were daily pumping out thousands of liters of alcohol gas into the air. We make sure that the printers we work with use alcohol-free printing processes. Most book distributors in Europe prefer the books to arrive individually shrink-wrapped, and so we make sure that the wrapping film is fully recyclable and that the plastics are good quality but weigh less, which helps with the recycling process.
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