Imagine if we decided to stop purchasing print books. Publishers would not be happy to hear this. The publishing industry has made some promotional efforts to show concern for the environment. But most publishing houses are still printing books. Very few of them offer authors the option to strictly print on demand or digitally. In the USA, about two billion books get printed annually. This means over 30 million trees need to get chopped down. That’s around 40,000 acres of tightly fitted trees. At about 40 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually, book publishing is high up on the environment list of naughty industries. Publishers print in bulk to reduce costs. Unsold books are then burnt, thrown away, or destroyed. Astonishingly, about a third of the books printed never get sold. They do not get donated to any center either. This means that around 10 million trees are chopped down for absolutely no purpose annually in the USA alone.
When I stress that there is no reason for this many trees to be chopped down, I am thinking spiritually. From a capitalist perspective, it makes great sense to waste for economic benefit. Over a third of landfill waste in the USA is paper. If we take into account pollution and other environmental costs associated with selling a printed book, the effects become tragic. The industry would be much better off ending print production. Paper consumption in the USA in general is ridiculously high, at 30 percent of global consumption despite it being less than five percent of the global population. Deforestation is a major global issue and becoming worse due to increased paper usage of almost 500 percent in the last 50 years. Aside from publishing houses, print media, and other printed material, there are legal, bank, business, school, hospital, and other types of documents that are still printed on paper. All can easily switch to digital. However, not a single country has implemented initiatives to reduce its paper consumption to zero. We are unable to make policy shifts in such simple matters because we do not hold lobbying power. The optimism that allowed for appreciating the Paris Agreement must be fantastical at best and absurd in truth.
