The last book of the highly successful Harry Potter series made news last July when it was named The “Greenest” Book Ever after Rowling, her publisher, and Vancouver-based Markets Initiative put a production plan into place with the goal of minimizing the impact the book's production has the environment.
According to this report, production of the book in Finland hit a snag when a FSC certified paper could not be used:The author of the best-selling Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling, has blocked the Finnish version of her latest book from being printed on local paper because it lacks the ecological FSC certification, her Finnish publisher said Wednesday.
It appears that FSC paper is not widely available in Finland: "The availability of FSC products in Finland is still very poor. We use mainly the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification schemes, but we do promote sustainable forestry. We also try to promote FSC," Antti Otsamo of the Finnish Federation of Forest Industries said in the DNA report.
Discussion
By Michael Jahn on Jan 24, 2008
Rowling could be a heck of a lot greener if she supported eBooks. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16983475/ I remain unconvinced that Amazon Kindle is the solution, but you can't say you are concerned about the environment and refuse to support eBooks - smells like a marketing ploy to me.
By Michael Josefowicz on Jan 25, 2008
The FSC label was ok, but using the Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification was not. Ah! the power of a brand. To take this as seriously as it deserves, it would be nice to know what was the carbon footprint of all the books that were printed all over the world? And who should pay for that? Each printer? The publisher? The author? (take a small piece out of the millions of royalties for a carbon offset?) How about if the printer put in a small upcharge for the carbon offset? I wonder if they would have gotten the job.