Are Your Comics Contributing to Global Warming?
This musing was brought up by an article in the Wall Street Journal, blogged by Jeff Matthews, on how Staples was no longer going to be doing business with Asia Pulp and Paper because of environmental concerns.
The article detailed why:
In the past, [Asia Pulp and Paper] has said it is moving toward relying for all of its wood on plantation trees but needs to cut natural forest to maintain production levels.
APP runs one of Asia’s largest pulp mills on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and has operations in China. The retailers worry that APP is destroying natural rainforest to feed its mills.
Concerns over rainforest destruction have been heightened in recent months because new data show that Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas, behind the U.S. and China. Fires set to clear natural forests and forested peat swamps after they have been logged are the major cause of those emissions.
APP last year sought permission to use an environmentally friendly logo issued by the Forest Stewardship Council. In October, after inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about APP’s planned use of the logo, the FSC barred the company from using it.
The problem is that a lot of comic books and graphic novels are being published in China, South Korea, and Indonesia, from a variety of smaller printers that are bundled and sold by larger printing firms here in the United States to publishers of all sizes, from the smallest of independents up to Marvel.
Does any production person for any company want to shed any light on this? More to the point, with multiple layers and language barriers between the comics publishers and the actual printers, can anybody reliably answer that they’re sure their books aren’t made from clear-cutters?
Your printer should be buying its paper from and FSA approved mill.It's paper that is managed responsibly and an initiative that has been going on for years.My bet is most publishers are all about cheaper.I remember DC moved it's Archives from Ronalds to a Chinese printer. Longer production time, non-managed tree farming. The first books were so cheaply made they fell apart.Much better.
FSC, sorry.
Global warming will not affect me too much, as I will be gone before the coasts are swamped, but I do worry for my younger friends and their offspring.Hemp is the solution for printing. You get roughly the same amount of paper per acre from hemp as you do from trees, but you can grow hemp in one year, not the decades it takes for trees.
Articles like this only serve to infuriate people, and cast a light on the global warming hysteria, and certain people's deisre to connect everything they can to it. I recall a piece from a couple weeks back that admionished Canadians from using Beer Fridges. When many Canadians got new efficient refrigerators, the old less efficient ones don't get thrown away, they got put on the back porch used solely for beer. Some well-meaning environmentalist decided to get their fifteen minutes and put out a press release saying this was a bad idea. The article got titled "Beer Fridges Cause Global Warming" and there was much laughing and pointing.
Not at all. The comics industry has often been incredibly wasteful of paper. Am I the only one who remembers "The Wisdom of Lobo"?
You go, Glenn! It's our shame that we've used this great land (and planet) and it's plentiful resources to waste, waste and waste some more. Whether environmentalism is science or mania, waste is a sin. To put it ironically: As long as it contributes to my sense of comfort and entitlement, put the pedal to the metal and let the devil grab the paper towels.
Some of my fellow comics fans might remember the massive "DC Implosion" of 1978, when half the line was canceled by Warner Communications. I wrote the press release and it went upstairs to Warner Publishing president William Sarnoff for approval. Bill asked that I add a paragraph talking about the massive forests we were going to save by the cut-backs; this was a personal thing for him, and he was deeply offended that we chopped down five trees for every tree worth of comic books we sold on the newsstands, which was where the majority of comics were sold in those days.I agreed with Bill and, in fact, liked him enormously — but even if I didn't he was our capo di tutti capi. I knew full well I was going to take a lot of shit who people who thought it was a measly cover-up for poor sales. It would come off that way to some, but it was nonetheless true.Today, with our forests disappearing at a rate alarming to everybody but Vinnie and magazine and newspaper sales at similarly horrific sell-throughs, I've got to wonder if we shouldn't be looking towards more efficient means of distribution. Say, maybe the Internet.
This is real.Victoria's Secret was shamed into joining the cause when it was revealed that they were using paper from mills abroad and protesters brought it to the media