Green books are the latest publishing craze. I have my own coming out in February, telling some of the stories behind this blog. It's called Confessions of an Eco Sinner, since you asked. But how "green" is the publication of all those green books?

In my last blog post, I came clean about the carbon footprint involved in researching the book. This week I went to see my British publisher, Random House, which publishes Eden Project Books, to firm up details about the environmental impact of the book's publication.

The good news is the book will have the logo of the Forest Stewardship Council on the back. The FSC is the leading certifier of sustainable timber. Some greens grumble about how rigorous it is. But I think this alliance of the timber trade and mainstream environment groups like WWF has a generally good track record in outlawing forest destruction and promoting replanting.

My book will also be printed on paper made from Russian FSC-certified wood at the Anajala mill in Finland, owned by local paper giant Stora Enso. And, far from being printed in the Far East, as many books are these days, it will hit the presses about 140 kilometres from London in Bungay in Suffolk, courtesy of the printing company Clays.

But what's the carbon footprint? No product seems to be complete without one, these days. I bought a packet of crisps the other day that had a label declaring that the carbon emissions from when the farmer planted the potato to when the packet was delivered to the supermarket were 75 grammes.

But books - even green books - haven't got that far yet. Random House in the UK told me it had a carbon footprint of slightly under 7000 tonnes a year.

More than half of that is down to gas and electricity in its offices. As regards the nitty-gritty of making and moving books, it only covers emissions from the time the company receives books from the printer to the time it delivers them to the warehouses of Amazon or Waterstones or whoever.

So Random House's corporate footprint is far less than the footprint of its books. Some might wonder about the legitimacy of that. But, in reality it is hard to know where corporate responsibility should begin and end.

And what about the role of the readers?

I have always assumed that buying a book via the Internet - from Amazon, say - would use less energy than going to a local bookstore. After all, you cut out all the energy used in lighting and heating the shop, not to mention fuel to travel to the bookstore and back.

But, in Japan at least, it seems that the opposite may be true. I recently spotted a paper by Eric Williams of the United Nations University in Tokyo on the green credentials of on-line book buying.

"E-commerce uses considerably more energy per book than conventional retail in dense urban areas," Williams concluded. Typically it used 5.6 megajoules per book, compared to 5.2 megajoules. Depending on your fuel, that might amount to a bit over 400 grams of CO₂.

The main reason for e-commerce's poor performance, says Williams, is the packaging. That and the fact that most people who buy books at bookstores do so as part of a bigger shopping expedition. So even driving to the bookshop may be responsible for fewer emissions than the courier van. Only in rural areas does e-commerce work out best.

Fred Pearce, senior environment reporter

Labels: earth, environment, freds-footprint, pollution, recycling

This map (click here for a larger version) showing the amount of packaging waste per person in Europe came as a bit of a surprise. OK, so Sweden and Finland come up tops - no surprises there. I expected Germany to do a little better. But the true surprise were the sore thumbs that are France and Ireland, and how they compare to the UK.

I thought France and Ireland had somewhat more environmentally-friendly approaches to packaging. Ireland introduced a plastic bag tax in 2002 which reduced their use by 90%, which I assumed was the sign of a fairly sustainable approach to plastics. And the French consider it criminal to wrap four tomatoes in plastic or shrink-wrap a coconut - this is the land of open-air markets we're talking about.

Meanwhile, across the Channel, vegetable aisles in UK supermarkets look like a massive PVC-spewing spider has cast a giant web. One-third of its packaging waste is plastic, 16% plastic film.

My intuition about Germany wasn't too far off. The graph below (which you can view larger and with explanations) shows that it recycles nearly all the packaging it produces - much more than any other European country.

















Ireland and France top the chart again - they simply produce more waste than anyone else in Europe and don't recycle enough. The Greeks and the Finnish are on to a winning streak by going to the root of the problem and producing very little packaging.

In the US and feeling a bit left out? Here's one that shows the scale of packaging waste across the pond and compares it to European waste. But it's not per person, so not quite fair. In fact, it looks like the US is doing rather well, in comparison. Yesterday, San Francisco voted to ban plastic shopping bags.

On a related note, researchers unveiled a new type of degradable plastic which they say could be used as packaging by cruise companies and thrown overboard into the open sea once it is no longer needed, freeing up large amounts of storage space. The plastic is a combination of polyurethane and a polymer used in medical sutures. It sinks (it is more dense than water), and dissolves in seawater in 20 days. Neat.

Check out also Carolyn William's great New Scientist feature on the Battle of the Bag.

Catherine Brahic, Online environment reporter

Labels: packaging, plastic, recycling