I think this is going to be a fairly varied collection of posts on stuff to do with art, science, culture, geekery and science communication. But we'll see, eh? And, just to be clear, what I type here is my own opinion, not my employers'.
To Foyles, for the Society of Young Publishers (yes! I get to be young again!) event, Book production – a matter of ethics? which focused mainly on how publishers are trying to be “green”.
The most telling take-home message was that it is not always the obvious things that have the most impact, environmentally.
David Penfold, Course Leader, Publishing Production & Design, London College of Communication talked of what training (Masters and the like) for new publishing staff about enviro issues. On the positive side, what was there seemed integrated (eg paper buying in book production modules), but there definitely was a sense of Could Do Better. Though are publishers demanding staff that understand these issues? That question, alas, I only thought of just now.
Sam Mawson, Project Controller, Production Department, Egmont told of the effort Egmont had gone to to understand where their paper came from – it took them several years to be able to state conclusively that none of their paper comes from illegally logged forests. Whilst that may seem surprising, it soon becomes clear that when you have over 100 companies supplying several types of paper made from pulps from several different sources, then there’s quite a bit of work to do to go back to the tree. And Egmont are sharing their system of paper classification with other publishers, helping everyone to do better.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking presentation was by the aimiably chatty Alexander Markham, Environment and Health & Safety, Reed Elsevier. He talked about work they’d done to analyse the environmental impact of just one of their many journals – Fuel, which is published in print and online. This was a complete lifecycle impact assessment of the journal, from how the raw materials were created, to what the consumer did with it. The two take-away results were startling:
This is quite non-obvious, especially given the rush to online publication with frequent justification that it is ‘greener’. But computers, servers, networks and so on all cost electricity and resources (copper etc).
Elsevier is still studying the consumer impact on the journal’s carbon and environmental life. Cheerily, hopefully they’ll share that knowledge with other publishers – as the Chair pointed out, there’s ‘green’ action across publishing at the highest levels and the grass roots too, with great enthusiasm from staff and CEOs alike for tackling environmental issues in publishing.
But more broadly, Alex’s presentation served as a salutary lesson that it is not always the obvious things that are the best things to do when it comes to the environment. But to not act, would be a very muppety thing to do indeed.
Last updated: Monday, 02 Jun 2008 - 23:38 UTC
© 2009 Nature Publishing Group
I just heard the online vs. print statistics as well. It’s quite astonishing, especially when you think you’re doing something ‘environmentally’ (i.e. try to use only electronic versions or articles/books/etc)
So this means I shouldn’t burn the excess copies of the papers I print out, right?
More seriously, the commuting result is impressive. Does this mean Nature should move its main offices to Cromer?
More seriously, the commuting result is impressive. Does this mean Nature should move its main offices to Cromer?
Certainly not. I want to keep it to myself.
I walk into work each morning and my ‘commuting habits’ include smiling at the baby moorhens on the canal. So you can rest assured that Nature Network is as green as can be.
I started to respond to this but it
metastasized intobecame a blog entryAs I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the problem with this sort of thing is unless it’s done in very fine detail, the noise can overwhelm the data.
For example, those who suggest that reading something on-screen can use equivalent amounts of energy to producing a paper copy rarely take into account a number of things. For instance:
*etc.
On-screen reading should only take into account the incremental energy use of reading that document – in most cases the computer would have been switched on anyway
I stayed up for an extra half an hour last night to type that blog entry. That’s an extra half an hour my computer was on (I don’t leave it on between uses). What enviroimpact of my blog post?
Well, I used no images, and not tooo many words
Yup, scrap images, make your webpage more efficient and you save energy too.