Neat idea in The Montreal Gazette this morning. The newspaper looks at its own operation and grades itself on its own sustainability footprint. Reporter Marian Scott has a long piece inside the paper about her own paper and the newspaper business generally:
…we looked at every aspect of our business: printing, distribution, advertising sales and newsgathering.
We checked the heating bills for our printing plant and downtown office and counted everything from newsprint – 15,000 metric tonnes this year – to the 61,500 Styrofoam cups used in our coffee machines. What did we learn? The biggest part of our footprint – by far – is paper.The newsprint in one year’s worth of The Gazette consumes the equivalent of 186,816 trees.
To produce that much newsprint uses enough energy to heat 2,472 homes for a year and enough water to fill 272 swimming pools, and emits as much carbon dioxide (C02) as 1,500 cars.
The paper’s publisher Alan Allnutt says in a letter to readers that this public self-assessment is the beginning of process that he plans to continue to reduce his paper’s impact on the environment:
Already, we have found that we – and the whole newspaper industry – have come a long way over the past couple of decades. A share of the newsprint The Gazette uses is made of recycled paper and the rest is made from wood chips that are a byproduct of the lumber industry – the trees are not cut down solely to be ground into pulp. The mills that produce our newsprint are state-of-the-art. Our own printing plant, which we opened in Notre Dame de Grace five years ago, is continually making environmental improvements, from using vegetable-based inks to steadily decreasing energy use.
Our product, the daily newspaper, is recycled in growing amounts in Montreal.
Still, further improvements in all these areas are inevitable. Increasing use of online versions of newspapers, like the digital Gazette, will help.
There are other parts of our operation where we don't do nearly as well as we'd like. We're an information business, and it's clear in our offices that the dream of a paperless society has not come true. We have recycling bins everywhere, but we shouldn't be using all the paper that ends up in them. As of this week, company policy will require everyone to do double-sided printing and copying whenever and wherever possible.
The delivery of the paper is heavily dependent on vehicles, and while it will be harder to find a solution to that, we know that education of our distributors and carriers will be a good first step.
We are, after all, in the same boat as everyone else: We have to balance our desire to do better on the environmental front with our need to prosper as a business – providing a vital service to our readers, as well as jobs for our employees. We do believe, however, that becoming a greener, more environmentally sustainable operation will be good both for society and for business.