Guest Column: The ‘Green’ Company
Last year, Hachette Book Group (HBG) launched an aggressive sustainability policy. Working together with passionate colleagues and industry experts, we realized that we could create a policy that would have a measurable impact on our industry. Companies routinely use policies to drive action, and the area of sustainability is no exception.
Based upon our experience, I've written the following tips for those of you who may be thinking about putting together your own sustainability policy. Please consider taking the plunge. It will help create a healthier planet, and make your readers, authors, customers and employees happy. It also will encourage your suppliers to support your environmental efforts.
1. Familiarize yourself with other companies' sustainability policies. At HBG, we looked at not only other publishers' policies, but those of our customers and suppliers, as well as some in completely different industries. Knowing how other companies approach sustainability is an important first step and might help you figure out what's most important to you. Usually these policies are publicly available on companies' websites.
2. Learn what's important to your stakeholders. What kinds of environmental issues have your customers been asking about? What kinds of "green" ideas have your fellow employees been suggesting? What initiatives have you or your suppliers already taken to be more environmentally responsible?
3. Take a look at the bigger picture. How does this effort relate to your company's overall mission and strategy? Do you already have an initiative around corporate social responsibility? Companies are increasingly focused on the triple-bottom line (also known as "people, planet, profit"). At HBG, we are very proud of our reputation as being a great place to work (having recently won honors in Book Business and Crain's New York Business), and we saw developing a sustainability policy as being important to our employees.
4. Measure your carbon footprint. It's important that your policy focus on those areas where you can make the greatest impact. Not surprisingly, we found that the paper in our books accounts for more than 90 percent of HBG's carbon footprint—so paper is the biggest focus of our policy. There are some great free tools available to help measure your carbon footprint, including the Greenhouse Gas Protocol (GHGProtocol.org) and the Paper Calculator (PaperCalculator.org).
5. Understand your environmental impact. Although paper is a renewable resource, there are environmental and social issues associated with its sourcing and production. It is important to understand these issues and how they relate to your paper-sourcing decisions before you develop a policy. At HBG, we found the information provided by the Green Press Initiative (GreenPressInitiative.org) and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC.org) to be very helpful.
6. Take a field trip. I had an opportunity to visit the Boreal Forest in Canada, and I would highly recommend a trip like this, regardless of where you are on your sustainability policy journey. We got to see virgin forests, areas recently logged, stands that had grown back, a logging camp, a paper mill in action, etc. It gave me a newfound respect for our fragile planet as well as a much better understanding of our own industry's supply chain.
7. Join a support group. I've found great relief and good ideas by talking with people in similar roles at other companies. The Book Industry Environmental Council (BIEC; BookCouncil.org) is one such group of folks committed to the success of the publishing industry as well as making progress on environmental issues.
8. Include specific, numeric goals in your policy. Some publishers have focused on goals for increasing use of recycled and certified "forest friendly" paper. (The Book Industry Treatise on Environmentally Responsible Publishing suggests minimum paper thresholds and can be found at GreenPressInitiative.org.) Some have focused on reducing their total carbon footprint. (The BIEC has set a goal of reducing total industry emissions by 20 percent by 2020.) Setting concrete, measurable "green" goals gives your company targets to achieve, demonstrates progress and energizes everyone around sustainability.
9. Make sure your policy is credible. It's important that your policy sets some stretch goals, but you need to balance that with what's achievable in the short term. At HBG, we wanted to take a leadership environmental position, but also wanted to know that we could deliver on our commitments. So we partnered with our paper suppliers and management to make sure that we could afford the changes that were required, especially in the first year or two of implementing the policy.
10. Communicate and celebrate. Once you've finalized your policy, make sure everyone knows about it—your customers, your own employees, your authors, the general public. If possible, commit to transparency. At HBG, we've committed to publicly sharing our progress against our sustainability goals each year. BB
Peter Datos is the vice president of inventory and procurement at Hachette Book Group and chairperson of the Book Industry Environmental Council.