Our Environmental Responsibility…

Check out our new Mission page to see the latest data on our tree planting and carbon emissions.

We only have one Earth, and the team at SRL Publishing takes measures to treat it well. We’re proud to be a climate positive book publisher since June 2020, the world’s first, removing more carbon emissions than we emit, and planting trees to replace the trees we have used for our products.

We are all too familiar with climate change, and the effect the book publishing world has had on our natural world. Some years ago, the book publishing industry would have been one of the most damaging industries, but new developments and new technology mean this is no longer the case. The way we operate means we deliberately waive our profit margins for the sake of the environment.

We have committed ourselves to being as environmentally friendly as possible. We start with our books, the main source of our carbon emissions. We use a relatively new technology called digital printing. The purpose of digital printing is to reduce our environmental impact and, in short, only print what we sell to reduce book returns and wastage. The model has been adapted by many international publishers, with companies from the biggest to the smallest changing the way books are printed. Traditional printing usually prints large quantities in anticipation of sales, where around 40% of which are left unsold. This equates to millions of books per year in the UK alone that were printed and ultimately destroyed before even being sold. Digital printing offers significant environmental advantages as unsold books are usually returned and destroyed, after being shipped around between distributors, printers, and retailers multiple times. It allows us to only print to fill the existing demand. Digital printing lessens the possibilities of returns, and reduces waste and greenhouse emissions. Wasted paper, wasted energy, greenhouse emissions, and landfill overflows are a result, and we aim to do our very best to keep this to a minimum.

Our books only use paper that is Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC®) and Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI®) certified. We also use paper that has received Chain of Custody certification from the FSC and the SFI. Chain of Custody (CoC) is a system that tracks wood fibre through the many stages of production; from the forest, to the mill, to the paper, and ultimately to the finished book. We seek to reduce page count in our titles where appropriate, the paper we use for our postage and communications is recycled paper and certified carbon neutral. For publishers, and consumers, CoC ensures the integrity of the paper supply chain and that the paper used in 100% of our books is sourced from responsibly managed forests.

We calculate our carbon emissions from scopes 1, 2, and 3 including the manufacture of our products and our digital footprint, including email data and website visitor data. We then add 15% and offset our emissions through highly verified projects. We also calculate the number of trees’ worth of paper used for our products and use this to ensure we have always planted more than we have used. To find out the locations of our trees and our projects, check out our page here.

Our Commitment

In 2020, we made a public promise to never overprint our books just for the sake of our profit margin. Something we have never done, and we never will. We remain committed to this promise and committed to challenging and inspiring environmental change within the industry.

SRL Publishing Ltd recognises that what we do today, affects the environment of both current and future generations and we are therefore committed to continuous environmental improvement. Our policy is to manage our business in such a manner as to have minimum impact on the environment in which we operate.

We will not be part of the problem. We will be part of the solution. We all share this world. We are glad to do our part in keeping it sustainable.