On Monday, November 30 Indigo announced their ambitious commitment to reaching 50% recycled paper in the books they retail within the next five years. While I very much applaud that corporate initiative, I might suggest it doesn’t go far enough, or encompass a growing alternative to paper waste, and that is print on demand technologies.

No longer the poor second-cousin to offset printing, print on demand often produces a superior product, with less impact to the environment, and is now used by legacy and indie publishers alike. Print on demand (POD) provides a sound environmental, little say economic model, to publishers, in that only the required number of books for an order are printed at any given time, thereby reducing costly and damaging warehouse space, returned books that haven’t sold and thus trees that were reduced to paper without need.

In Indigo’s efforts to provide a greener, more responsible model, books that are not only produced from recycled papers should be highlighted and featured to customers, but those which use POD technologies.

There are many paths to a greener earth, and it behooves us to employ as many as we can.

Here at Five Rivers we employ print on demand technologies as part of our responsible management of environmental and financial resources, using Lightning Source (LSI) for our printing needs. Some, but not all of LSI’s papers are made from recycled fibres, although all are of archival quality.

In addition, we accept returns of all our books from booksellers, although to be honest we experience less than 1% returns because all our books are printed to order, and when our books are ordered for stock, we monitor those orders very carefully to ensure that over-stocking doesn’t take place, saving our booksellers and ourselves unnecessary cost, and ensuring that we have the least impact on the environment as possible.