dorling kindersley books

How is Made with Care different from your other books/what did you change in terms of positive processes for this range?

We’ve:

• taken off the book jackets to save paper and energy
• used card which is 100% recycled
• printed the books on FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified paper which is sourced from responsibly managed forests. So for every tree that is used another is planted
• used vegetable inks and environmentally friendly glues
• energy-efficient in-line binding process
• minimised travel and ensured the books are printed locally in Europe
• worked with the best environmental printers in the business. (Mohn Media is one of Europe’s most pioneering printers and has a solid track record of environmental work. It prides itself on continually researching and developing more eco-friendly products and printing processes. Based in Gutersloh in Germany, the printer has reduced its own carbon footprint by 52 per cent).

In what way are you pioneering/leading the way on ethical and environmental publishing?

As an illustrated publisher we are leading the way with the quality of paper we use and are also:

• founder members of PRELIMS (Publishers Resolution for Ethical International Manufacturing Standards), a publishing group set up to coordinate efforts about ensuring that our Asian Printers meet high standards of social responsibility which will be third party assessed through ICTI’s CARE Process.
• part of the World Wildlife Fund’s UK Forest and Trade Network and are committed to ensuring that all our paper products come from known and legal sources, according to criteria created by WWF.
• founder members of PREPS (Publishers Database for Responsible Environmental Paper Sourcing) which uses a grading system based on the WWF system that allows publishers to find out easily if papers are from legal and known sources.

Are you the first, and if not, who else has got in there before you?

• This is very much a collaborative effort to create as high a standard as possible across the illustrated publishing industry, and while we are a leader in this area it is more important to encourage good practices across the board.

Are you going to share your approach with other publishers as an example of best practice?

Absolutely, there are several working party publishing groups that our company is involved with that cover manufacturing, working conditions of the manufacturers, and the ethical and environmental credentials of the paper and we will share our experiences wherever relevant with these groups. There is a far higher chance of industry-wide evolution if we share experience and solutions.

How much has DK invested in the research and development of this initiative?

A lot of time and effort has gone into the research of this initiative. But this time and effort to find the best practices for production have been part of a wider aim to find best practice for all our production, not just for this initiative.

Why are you launching Made with Care now?

The Penguin FSC Chain of Custody (COC) was extended to DK in September which allowed us to buy and sell our product using FSC paper. This has had a major impact on the timing of this project.

Isn’t this just a marketing ploy?

It’s a project in which we bring together in one place all of the understanding we have about the environmental impact of producing books. It is also indicative of the expansion of our decision-making process; not only do we consider if the printer has the capacity for the work, but we look at their environmental status, and the materials they are using. It’s just as important that the consumer should understand the effects of their buying choices as it is for us as a company to understand the effect of ours.

Aren’t you just jumping on the ethical bandwagon?

This is not about bandwagons or sound bites. Years of purchasing and production placement policies are what allow us to now have so much of our production with printers that have been assessed for their social and environmental responsibility. And ISO 14001 is a good example of how industry is approaching this issue as it’s based on meeting certain targets and also having a rolling target program so that there is continuous improvement.

How can you prove that you are being ethical and socially responsible?

Proof that ethical and social claims can be backed up is important which is why in our purchasing and our choice of printers we have chosen to apply international standards, FSC, ICTI and ISO 14001 that are third party audited.

Aren’t you worried that by making a point about ethically and environmentally aware books with a very narrow range of titles, you will hurt the sales of those books in the DK stable that aren’t currently produced in this way?

Part of this initiative is about communicating openly about everything we do to our consumers. From April 2008 all new books from DK will include a box on the back cover that talks about the company’s work across all of our production. We don’t believe this will have a negative impact on sales. We believe that people expect high standards from us as a company.

Isn’t the cost of making these books going to be higher? What does that mean for your profit margins in the long-term?

In theory, yes, there will be an impact on profit margins, but as with all things there will come a tipping point in commercial thresholds at which point this mode of production is so much the norm that there will no longer be justification for a surcharge. The location in which we manufacture affects the costs too and printing in Europe will remain more expensive because of higher labour costs.

What else are you doing to be more green?

DK is committed to maintaining the best ethical and environmental practises at its London offices. All A4 paper for printing and photocopying is 100% recycled, and its letter-headed stationery uses a recycled paper containing at least 75% post-consumer waste and 25% FSC accredited fibre. We operate recycling collection schemes and 40% of its general waste is recycled. The environmental cost of all of its business flights is offset by contributions to Climate Care. The operations of DK as part of Penguin UK are monitored by an Eco-committee, which constantly explores ways to ensure that it reduces its impact on the environment whenever possible.

What is DK’s travel policy to minimise its carbon footprint?

DK is a global business but we aim only to make necessary flights and are aiming to reduce them by 10% year on year. The way we are doing this is with the following:

• No UK domestic flights where possible and unless authorised by a manager
• Travel in Europe should be via train where practical
• Combine or extend trips to avoid repeat flights
• Other than that we are looking to cut our flights by 10% in 2008 and every year after that

What is your parent company, Pearson, doing in this area?

DK’s parent company, Pearson plc, has had a corporate environmental policy since 1992 and all of the Pearson companies are working towards a carbon neutral future. Pearson is also a founder signatory to the UN Global Compact. This sets out a series of principles against which it measures itself in areas of human rights, labour standards, the environment and anti-corruption.

Penguin Books (UK) Ltd, of which DK is a division, was the first major publishing company in the UK to adopt a public paper purchasing policy, having consulted its suppliers and environmental groups such as WWF and Greenpeace. It was also the first major publishing company to sign up as a member of the WWF-UK Forest Trade Network (FTN). Together with Greenpeace, the WWF-UK-FTN promotes the use of the Forest Stewardship certification as the only option that provides independent third-party verification of sustainability claims.

Do you work with any environmental charities/organisations?

DK has also forged charitable partnerships with non-profit conservation groups such as The Rainforest Foundation, The Coral Reef Alliance (in the US) and the Marine Conservation Society (in the UK) whereby profits from book sales support these organizations. The Penguin Group, including DK, currently donates over 5,000 overstocked books to BookAid International to be redistributed to schemes in developing countries.

What do you want to improve with Made with Care? Where are its weak points and what are you doing to address them?

As mentioned before, this is a best practice initiative so all of the learnings are influencing all our future print buying decisions. It’s leading us to question in more detail our suppliers’ environmental credentials, including waste management and energy usage. We’d like to make printing more affordable so that we can print more books in this way going forward. We are also continuing to look for more FSC paper for more of our books, but are constrained by the amount of suitable FSC paper available for full colour printing (see question below on FSC)

We are committed to investigating, on an ongoing basis, what glue and ink products are available and their relative merits and downsides.

What are you going to do to keep this initiative going?

See answers in FSC and Printers section. By the end of 2008 all suppliers will be certified with FSC chain of custody (COC) and there is ongoing work on environmentally sound materials. We will be publishing more books in the range going forward and will be continuing to learn and apply best practices to these books and to all those we publish.

This set of titles is the logical conclusion of our awareness of environmental issues. It is not, however, a cost-effective mode of production yet and these books will be a progression towards improving all aspects our impact, through production, on the environment. These books are very much a flagship for all our efforts to make sure that all our books are produced with social and environmental responsibility.

What endorsements do you have so far for this initiative?

World Wildlife Fund

"The WWF UK Forest & Trade Network looks out for great leadership in reducing our impact on the world's forests, and the wider environment. Dorling Kindersley's Made with Care initiative is a fantastic undertaking in our view, really making sure that with these books – you truly are getting a better read!"

FSC

What does FSC stand for?

Forest Stewardship Council.

What does Forest Stewardship Council mean exactly?

FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) have a set of minimum standards to ensure that the paper is from well managed sources that must be met before paper can be labelled FSC.

The paper must be from legal sources, not from an area with outstanding disputes with indigenous peoples, not from an area which is uncertified and of high conservation value, and also the paper must contain no genetically managed material. It must be demonstrated from source to end product that these standards have been met, which means that the forest the pulp comes from must meet this standard and that thereafter the chain of custody of that stock must be upheld right to the end product. In our case that’s the books but it could be for a garden chair or a wardrobe or any other wood based product.

The FSC chain of custody and forestry management standards are endorsed by the World Wildlife Fund.

Whenever we manufacture a book at a printer who also has FSC chain of custody and will be using FSC paper, we can now label that book with the FSC logo which will show that the DK business supports responsible forestry management.

To achieve FSC chain of custody DK Production have had to prove that our production system is sophisticated enough to be fully in control of the materials used by all our printers and that therefore where we label with the FSC this logo will be 100% accurate.

Is there/will there be enough FSC paper to fulfil the vast amount of books that you publish going forward – that’s if your intention is to make (nearly) all of your books like this?

DK looks to use all of its buying power responsibly and ever increasing proportions of paper it buys come from FSC certified sources. However at this stage only a small percentage of the world’s forests are covered by any certification scheme, and only 7% of the world’s production forests are FSC certified. This means that not all of our titles can be on FSC products. It is particularly hard to find enough paper of the quality we require to print full colour books – paper quality is much more important for these than for unillustrated books. But we feel it is important to continue using what FSC stock we can, to encourage the market, making it clear that there is demand for demonstrably well managed forest products, and in this way to reward good forestry practice.

What kind of paper are your other books printed on, i.e. the vast majority of them?

The percentage of the DK list on FSC papers will be increased within the next 12-18 months and the remainder will be from approved suppliers, many of which are producing papers using other forestry certification programs. By the end of 2008 all of DK’s books will be printed on papers graded 3 or above in the PREPS grading scheme, which means it has all come from sustainable legal sources.

PRINTERS

How ethical are your printers?

We will make sure that all of our Far Eastern printers have ICTI CARE certification as appropriate by the end of 2008. Also all printers will have either have ISO 14001, or their own CSR policies will adopt the principles and standards by the end of 2008.

Also, all of our printers will have FSC chain of custody certification by the end of 2008.

What is ISO 14001?

ISO 14001 is an Environmental Management System (EMS). All companies that have this have assessed their energy use and impact on the environment and set themselves targets for reduction and improvement which must then be met and which are third party audited.

What is ICTI?

The ICTI CARE process was created in 2003 to enable the worldwide toy (and now publishing) industries to assure the consumer that their products are manufactured in safe and humane environments. To achieve this, its intent is to provide single, fair, thorough and consistent monitoring program for factories.

Our printers in the Far East are all signed up to this now, thus assuring us that these printers are also socially and ethically responsible and therefore treat their staff well.

Why aren’t the books printed in the UK. Printed locally in Germany is not that local!

We judged the location of print on two factors: Our long and good working relationship with Mohn and ongoing joint work on the environmental production of books. DK, as a business, sells British titles into many European countries in local language editions so we are looking beyond initial production and towards a longer term strategy.

Note: Mohn Media is one of Europe’s most pioneering printers and has a solid track record of environmental work. It prides itself on continually researching and developing more eco-friendly products and printing processes. Based in Gutersloh in Germany, the printer has reduced its own carbon footprint by 52 per cent).

How can you ensure that your international publishers will follow the same ethical route as DK UK?

We print most of the books for our international customers, and they will be printed at Mohn, as the English language ones are. We will work with our Far East customers to ensure that we only work with suitably certified Far East printers.

PRODUCTION PROCESSES

Jackets

Why do you put jackets on your other books, as they seem to use unnecessary paper and printing?

Customers respond well to jackets which protect the books and they have long been part of a hardback book’s design and format. Increasingly we hope to be able to move customers away from expecting them but this is not going to happen overnight.

What’s biodegradable?

The paper and boards are biodegradable; this makes up by far the majority of the product.

What about your books and packs that involve plastic? Will you be making these more environmentally at some point?

We are using PET rather than PVC where possible and all our waste packaging use is from non-toxic and recyclable packaging materials.

Glues

What are your glues made of?

• modified rosin resins produced out of wood resin
• alkyd resins originating from esterification of vegetable oils
• unchanged vegetable oils eg linseed oil and/or soy bean oil
• chemically modified vegetable oils

Some of your glues contain hazardous ingredients. Are your books safe?

All of the components of our books are tested to ensure that they do not contain any hazardous ingredients, the more complex books are also tested as a final product to ensure that they meet high standards of safety levels.

Inks

What sort of ink is used to print your other books?

There are options for inks now beyond the traditional mineral inks. Vegetable inks from renewable sources have developed a lot in the last few years and we have used these in some of our titles, most notably on Rainforest, published September 2006. Different types of ink produce different effects so a large part of our choice here is currently dictated by our requirements of the end product.

What are vegetable inks?

These are inks in which the oil that the pigment, resins, fillers, and varnishes are dispersed in is derived from vegetable matter rather than from minerals (ie petroleum).

Are your inks biodegradable?

They are not 100% biodegradable.

TRANSPORT

Why do you ship most of your books from the Far East? How long will you continue to do this for?

The pricing we need to achieve often dictates that we print in the Far East wherever the final destination of the books may be. Given this we are using our buying resources to their best possible effect and making sure that we minimise our impact in all areas. From initiatives such as Made with Care we may see changes in the markets that allow us to make further advances in minimising that impact.

What kind of freight suppliers do you use?

Dorling Kindersley, along with Pearson Shared Service that acts on behalf of Penguin, actually uses very few freight suppliers. This enables DK, together with the group, to work with suppliers who take a very sensible and managed approach to environmental issues. Contracts in place with these suppliers require them to submit their approach to the environment in writing. We only work with suppliers who have their own environmental policies in place to reduce their carbon emissions and continue to work on improving their environmental policies and targets.

How much do you know about your carbon footprint on freight?

DK, along with the Penguin Group, is working with our three main suppliers to reduce our CO2 footprint on freight. Along with our main Sea freight supplier we have put in place a CO2 calculator which enables the business to measure the CO2 emissions on any of our current sea freight routes globally.

If you have to resort to trucks, how do you manage capacity?

By maintaining this approach to freight suppliers and by managing Pearson Group freight movements we are able to consolidate and maximise container and lorry utilisation across the Group. This reduces the number of containers Pearson Group ships to the UK and also reduces the number of lorry movements in and out of the Distribution Centre in Rugby.

In order to further enhance our utilisation of our sea freight containers we ship our product loose from the Far East Printers and re-palletise in the UK. This enables the very maximum use of the space in a container thus reducing the number of containers we need to ship.

As a group we have updated our two 18 Tonne lorries based at Rugby in order to improve their environmental foot print and we have also purchased a new LPG 3 Tonne Van (November 07) which is used to deliver all internal mail, parcels etc between Pearson sites in Rugby, Harlow and London.

We are also working with DHL to explore ways in which we can reduce the CO2 from shipping parcels through out the UK (1.5 million 2007). To this end the Distribution Centre has put in place a system which will merge orders from customers into fewer cartons. We also work with DHL to maximise the use of vehicles we use to collect our product from the DC and are constantly monitoring these collections and times in order to reduce un necessary vehicle movements.

Does the fleet include any hybrid or electric vehicles or LPG etc?

Yes, our haulage firm does deploy LPG trucks.

Can the books be transported by rail? If so why aren't you doing it as this is more environmentally friendly?

We are not currently shipping books using a rail network. There is actually more mechanical handling involved thus making this route not practical. From a service point of view the delays and additional haulage needed to ship via rail make it unviable.

Why isn’t paper taken by rail from the French paper mill?

The pulp is moved by rail into the mill in France.

Once the paper is made however it is not as viable to send out the paper by rail as they will be selling to so many different suppliers. The equivalent problem for us would be sending out our books from the warehouse to the shops by rail, only possible if we deliver to a small handful of central points.

Do you have a target for transport emissions etc?

Yes, we are working with suppliers who have all got and continue to work on environmental policies and targets, all working with independent companies like Carbon Trust and Smart Company.

How are you ensuring that your transport is efficient and minimises your carbon footprint/CO2 emissions?

In all our shipping, both by sea and road, DK and our service providers all work really hard at capacity utilisation, so containers and lorries are working as hard as possible, keeping more trucks off the road. Our UK haulage company uses trucks that are new and have the latest environmental measures in place.