The ‘Green’ TEAM

“We’re proud that our initiative set a benchmark for our industry. For us, this is not a competition, but a collaboration with our fellow publishers, paper mills and printers,” says Andrew Van der Laan, director and senior project manager of the publishing operations projects group at Random House. “It’s gratifying to see more environmental policies come forward from our fellow publishing companies.”

Van der Laan reports the plan is on track, with Random House exceeding its full-year 2007 goal of 10-percent recycled fiber by last October.

Beyond its environmental paper policy, Random House has, like Scholastic, embraced a number of other practices designed to reduce impacts throughout the company. A “green” committee, chaired by CEO Peter Olsen, identifies environmental initiatives across company divisions, and a carbon audit, completed in 2006, has formed the basis of efforts to reduce emissions—replacing 4,000 conventional light bulbs with compact fluorescents and use of 15-percent wind power at the company’s corporate headquarters, among others.

Newly fashionable in corporate America, carbon audits and offsets—where carbon emissions in one area are cancelled out in another—are being adopted by publishers. Perhaps the best-known example is Al Gore’s companion book to his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” published by Rodale and made “carbon neutral” by a company called Native Energy, which sells stakes in CO2-reducing projects. The carbon-neutral label has since become an important branding element in the entertainment world and even in the 2008 presidential primaries.

Random House’s program has proven beneficial as a brand-builder as well, helping the company to stand out in a marketplace increasingly conscious of the environmental impact of its choices.

“A number of book projects have come to us expressly because their authors, knowing of our eco-commitment, wanted to be published by a Random House Inc. imprint,” Van der Laan says. “Our editors are constantly keeping agents informed about our paper-
content progress, because many of them care and many of their clients care. Booksellers are also keenly interested in what we are doing, both for their own devotion to a ‘greener’ world and because their customers often ask them about the recycled content in the books they are selling.”