I’m late with my October BlogHers Act Canada post. I was on the ball for September, posting about how I reduce packaging waste in my kitchen at harvest and preservation time. But October? Man, this month went by in a flash!
I’ve been very busy working on an important book for the publishing company I work for. This book’s page count rounds up to about 1,800 pages, so you can imagine how many trees we kill just trying to get to a final set of proofs for this title. Factor in 40 other editors in my department, and thousands of titles being produced every year…it’s enough to make a tree hugger like me wanna cry. Needless to say, although efforts are made to reduce the amount of paper we use, the publishing industry is not very paper-friendly.
Some of the efforts employed at my company to reduce paper usage and waste include:
- Moving proofs around electronically. I try to use my scanner to provide PDF files to our typesetter, who then will provide me with a corrected PDF file which I can either print out to proofread, or check for errors on-screen.
- Our typesetter and in-house production group are beginning to make use of double-sided printing for the majority of print jobs. It seems like a very simple thing to do, but for a lot of editors, and some specific products, this makes reviewing pages a little bit tricky. And some authors just plain refuse to deal with double-sided pages (which I think is ridiculous, seeing as pages in their real, live books are printed on…TADAAAA…both sides of the page).
- We make the effort not to photocopy unnecessarily, and use paper made from recycled material wherever possible.
Although a lot of the proofs I receive are printed on both sides of the page, many are not. Lately, instead of throwing old proofs into my recycling bin in the home office, I’ve been flipping those stacks of pages over, and printing on the other side. This means I have to strike out the back side of the page with a pen, so as not to confuse the typesetter or myself, but the extra step is worth it knowing those trees haven’t died in vain.
What new efforts are you making to recycle more?
I’m probably ordering my wedding invitations from a company that uses ONLY recycled paper to make BEAUTIFUL handmade paper: http://www.twistedlimbpaper.com/
Also, my company’s printers spit out a single page of paper with our user name on it for EVERYTHING we print (makes me cry inside every time I have to print something). I save those for note paper, both at work and at home.