Green Book Alliance Releases New "Sustainability Checklist"

After lengthy consultations with publishers and printers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., the Green Book Alliance (GBA) has released its Printer-Publisher Sustainability Checklist. The checklist can be viewed online and is downloadable from the GBA website.

The checklist was created to help foster discussions between publishers and printers around environmental sustainability in manufacturing books. Produced in a Q&A format, the checklist offers sustainability questions that publishers are or should be asking of printers. Organized into nine sections, with a total of 44 questions, the checklist provides a blueprint for starting or extending a conversation about sustainability. The suggested text that follows each question explains how printers might answer those questions.

The nine sections include questions organized around paper, printing, packaging, use of plastic, greenhouse gas emission, ESG (environmental, social, and governance), shipping/transportation, and standards. The overall focus is on understanding both what is being asked and consistently commuicating what manufacturing partners are doing concerning sustainability. The questions are global and can be used by any company, independent of where an organization is in its sustainability journey.

In preparing this checklist, the GBA assumed that both publishers and their manufacturing partners are working to understand various sustainability topics. In asking these questions, a publisher signals that it has started its sustainability journey. Manufacturers have addressed elements of sustainability for a generation or more, and aspects of this checklist will be familiar to them. To the extent that either party is new to some components of sustainability, the GBA worked to define terms and explain the details of practical answers.

Formed in 2020, the Green Book Alliance is a joint effort of the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), Book Industry Communication (BIC), and BookNet Canada (BNC). Alliance activities include information sharing, joint planning, environmental events, and other initiatives, including the development of this sustainability checklist. The current draft is considered a living document and will be updated as needed. Checklists for conversations between other trading partners are expected.