In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, we want to highlight The Green Press Initiative, which is an organization dedicated to helping the book and newspaper industries understand their environmental impact.

Columbia University Press joined the Green Press Initiative in April 2004 and has worked hard since then to reduce our environmental footprint as a book publisher. Some of the steps we have taken in the last few years include:

• We print 85% of all new titles on post-consumer recycled content and 50% of our reprints on PCW stock.

• We are continually working with our printers to commit to supplying us with good recycled stock at a comparable price to non-recycled stock.

As a result of using PCR paper in the period from July 2006 to July 2007 we saved 2,200 trees, 926,794 gallons of water, and 380,042 kilowatt hours of electricity. We also did not create 102,981 pounds of solid waste and 201,772 pounds of greenhouse gases. This more than doubles the reduction we made in the comparable time frame from 2005-2006.

Other ways in which we have reduced our environmental impact outside of the printing process include:

• We e-mail cover art for approval to our authors instead of printing and shipping it.

• Internally we have created a remote access cover blog that allows staff to view and comment on cover art without having to print out and distribute multiple copies of the document.

• We provide authors with the option to receive pages via e-mail as pdfs. This allows authors to see and comment on the copyediting of their works without creating gas emissions in the shipment of the same documents.

Columbia University Press remains committed to improving on the great start we’ve already made in reducing the environmental impact of our publishing activities.