Rising paper price ups books prices in China for now and perhaps later the world is the title of Henry Sanderson piece for the Associated Press.
He reports that the government “crackdown on small, polluting paper mills have caused a paper crunch in China, pushing up the price of paper by 10 percent this year and forcing printers to delay books and publishers to raise prices.”
“Paper mills, most of them small, inefficient operations, accounted for 17 percent of all industrial water pollution in 2005, according to the Chinese Paper Association, an industry group.”
Why is this price increase good news? Because it is another glaring example of how the rush to China is a rush to trouble. Keeping costs and retail prices down by outsourcing is not a positive event. It is becoming more and more apparent that cheaper equals dangerous. The more costs are cut the more dangerous the product becomes for the consumer and the more dangerous the production of that product becomes for the environment. A completely unsustainable equation.
Article lowlights:
-According to Pira International, a research and consultancy firm specializing in the print and paper industries, “publishers in the United States and Europe are turning to Chinese printers to churn out books, reducing their costs by up to 30 percent.”
-Penguin UK spends about 60 percent of its manufacturing budget in China.
-“China is deeply embedded in the international book market. It is the United States’ biggest offshore supplier of print products, chiefly books. Exports of paper products from China rose 76 percent between 2005 and 2006, according to government statistics, and are projected to increase a similar amount by the end of the decade.”
-“In a bid to clean up China’s rivers and spur the paper-making industry to consolidate and modernize by using wood pulp, the government has closed hundreds of mills and targeted hundreds more for shutdown by 2010. The restructuring is spurring heavy demand for wood pulp, nearly all of which China must import.”
-Unlike the West, The Chinese paper industry has relied on straw and other waste from crops to make paper but crop and straw waste is highly polluting and not as easily recycled as wood pulp.
So now the Chinese, the country that invented paper, is closing many of its paper mills and IMPORTING wood pulp.
Now for some good news. Things are beginning to change. Alan Grimes has a post at the Big Bad Book blog titled Being Green Isn’t So Hard where provides updates as to what some of the major publishers are doing to try and get green. He also reminds us of a 2005 study co-sponsored by BookTech magazine, Co-Op America, and Green Press Initiative that found “that “80% of consumers who had purchased a book or magazine in the past six months would be willing to pay more for a book or magazine printed on recycled paper.” More than 42% of respondents were also willing to pay an additional $1 to purchase a book printed on recycled paper. “
Unfortunately, the harsh reality remains that “on average, only about 5% of the paper used by US book publishers comes from recycled paper or paper managed in an environmentally friendly way.”
We have a long way to go.
I think this would also be a fitting topic of discussion for the panel of ABA booksellers who are headed over to China for the Beijing Book Fair. Maybe they can add a boat ride down one of the polluted rivers followed by a tour of one of the closed paper mills to their itinerary which includes a visit two Chinese publishing houses and four Chinese bookstores.