Replanting Our Pages

Replanting Our Pages

We love books. Curling up next to each other, each with a book in our hands, is about as good as life gets for us. And print books add to our feeling of cozy comfort.

But we also recognize that the publishing industry, of which we are a small part, is a heavy user of paper. Which, of course, contributes to the global deforestation problem.

Becoming Part of the Solution

One part of the solution we’ve embraced for decades is print-on-demand publishing.

A major source of unnecessary paper usage comes from the publishing practice of producing large print runs of books to minimize the cost per book. But then the unsold copies get returned to the publishers (meaning they’ve been shipped twice) and then destroyed, usually by being ground into pulp to produce more paper (meaning the paper has been manufactured twice).

It’s estimated that 40% of these print runs — up to 85% for some genres — are unsold and destroyed this way.

Printing books only as they are sold to readers eliminates most of this wasteful and destructive practice.

While the bigger players are making efforts to increase the use of recycled paper — the #1 best way for the industry to reduce deforestation and its overall carbon footprint, according to Greenpeace — we don’t engage directly in the printing of our or our clients’ books, so we have little opportunity to influence that part of the solution.

So to kick off 2025, we’ve joined with our friend Paul Kirch and his BOSS Academy community to plant trees via Evertreen. Our first “forest” is in Madagascar.

We’re committed to adding 100 trees each month.

What’s the Impact?

That’s what I wanted to find out. How many books does planting one tree mitigate?

But the answer, as many posts and articles online tell us, is complicated. Frankly, the sources I looked at that tried to go directly to answering one tree = how many books came across as wild guesses.

So, I stepped back and tried to understand how much paper is produced from one tree. Although these estimates vary widely too, the variations seem to flow from assumptions about the size of the tree we’re talking about. For example, HowStuffWorks used a tree size of 1 foot in diameter by 60 feet tall and calculated that it could “produce about 80,500 sheets of paper.”

In attempting to estimate how many trees it has saved, print management company PaperCut cited a reference book using a tree size of 6-8 inches in diameter and 40 feet tall to give an estimate of 8,333 sheets of paper. A “real scientific answer” was offered by 8billiontrees.com, using a tree size of 8 inches in diameter and 45 feet tall to get a range of 10,000 to 20,000 sheets. And one commenter on Reddit went by the weight of an “average” fully grown pine tree to calculate it could produce 250,000 sheets!

I’m not going to examine the assumptions about weight. But I do think the 1 foot in diameter by 60 feet tall estimate most closely matches the tree sizes I see on timber-hauler trucks on the highway, and thus, I will use the HowStuffWorks estimate of 80,500 sheets in my calculations.

Books Per Tree

The glaring error in attempts to convert any of these estimates into the number of books is that all of them that I saw simply equated their “sheets” number with the pages in a book. Um, really?

That’s not how books are printed. First of all, they’re printed on both sides of each sheet. So that doubles the number of book pages per tree.

The number doubles again when you recall that the standard 8.5×11 inch sheet will be cut in two to produce a 5.5×8.5 book. (The numbers would be different for a slightly larger 6×9 inch book or a slightly smaller 5×8 inch book, but not by very much.)

That means the number of printed book pages per tree is about 322,000.

[80,500 sheets per tree X 4 book pages per sheet = 322,000 pages per tree]

If we use an average of 250 pages per book, that gives us 1,288 books per tree.

[322,000 pages per tree ÷ 250 pages per book = 1,288 books per tree]

And our commitment to plant 100 trees per month, over the years they take to grow, will eventually account for 128,800 books per month — and 1,545,600 books per year!

Join Us?

You can donate a tree to our forest right on our Evertreen page (use our forest code 6793d8f021654 ).

Here’s the latest from the people doing the work on-site: