Green Is The New Black

By Sarwar A. Kashmeri
For the Valley News

Margo Baldwin, president and publisher of Chelsea Green, one of the Upper Valley's best known companies, enjoys tough challenges. In the 1990s, she had stepped back from the business to spend more time with her family. When the business started to founder, Baldwin returned in 2002 and turned the company around. She also refocused it on environmental stewardship and politics.


Now Baldwin has taken on a new challenge: She'd like to convince the publishing industry to transform itself to a “zero-waste publishing” model.

I had always assumed that bookshops took books that were no longer new or selling as well as they used to and moved them from one shelf to another to put them on sale, just as clothing retailers do. Not true.

“That would make too much sense,” Baldwin said.

Here's what actually happens: The publisher ships new books to a store. Unsold books are shipped back to the publisher by the store. The publisher then sells these unsold books to a remainder dealer and ships it there. Bookstores then order these unsold books from the remainder dealer, which ships them back to the original store. “It is a completely insane system,” said Baldwin who would like to see the industry move to a non-return sales model, a change that the big publishing companies refuse to adopt.

The resistance to that model doesn't make any sense to Baldwin. “We already sell in this way to the big online bookstores such as Amazon,” she said. “Amazon has perfected an electronic system of on-demand ordering and selling in which computers predict the following week's demand and order accordingly. There is absolutely no reason why other stores cannot have access to the same technology.”

This convoluted way of doing business also damages the environment. According to the Association of American Publishers, global gross sales of consumer books in 2004 were 1.4 billion units. Almost a third (around 434 million) were returned unsold. Assuming half (217 million) of the unsold books were shipped out again from the “remainder houses,” Chelsea Green has calculated that an extra 1,305 million pounds of books had to be shipped an extra 59 million miles using 8.4 million gallons of diesel fuel and releasing 188 million pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“And that doesn't even account for the energy and environmental costs of the remaining 217 million books that are dumped, usually in to a landfill,” Baldwin said.

She wrote an article for Publishers Weekly last August that documented the waste and extra energy consumption the current publishing model requires and proposed that the industry change its existing practice and sell to stores on a non-returnable basis only.

I'd always thought it was the large chain bookstores that dictated the conditions under which they would purchase books from a publisher. “Absolutely not,” Baldwin told me. “It is the other way around. The publishers are the ones that insist on selling books on a non-returnable basis to keep their market share and work off their cash flow. Their mantra is: Get out as many books as you can and keep billing.”

The reaction to Baldwin's article was lukewarm. Some of the smaller publishers and stores were in favor but the big publishers were not. Convinced that the rest of the industry will eventually come around, Chelsea Green has decided to move out front and will announce its new “green” publishing model in June at the Book Expo in New York -- the publishing industry's annual gathering. “At the Expo, we will announce our ‘Green Bookselling Partnership Program,' and that we already have seven key independent booksellers that have joined it,” Baldwin told me.

Chelsea Green, which publishes its books on recycled paper only, is introducing a non-returnable model with built-in monetary and environmental benefits for the booksellers: The company will give the participating booksellers a larger than normal discount, pay for shipments to the stores (that adds around 7 percent to the stores' margins), and make the entire transaction as close to carbon-neutral as possible by buying offsets to balance the shipments' estimated carbon release.

“The stores that join our Green Partnership will get first dibs on our authors and there will be additional benefits that we will build in as the model gets under way,” Baldwin said. “And if the books are not coming back to us, we cut that out from the environmental costs also.”

It is a bold gamble, but I believe Chelsea Green is on the right track. Consumers have already shown they will pay a slight premium to buy environmentally friendly items, and major companies (think Volvo, Wal-Mart, Conoco, British Petroleum, Toyota) have begun to transform their brands and practices to more eco-friendly ones. “In our view, going green is not only the moral thing to do in an age of global warming and peak oil, it's the only viable economic thing to do if we're to survive and thrive in a future of skyrocketing energy costs,” Baldwin said.

Sooner or later the rest of the book industry, with its increasingly slim margins, also will discover that on today's balance sheets green is the new black. It will be fun then to say, oh yes, it all started back in the Upper Valley, where this small publishing company called Chelsea Green placed a calculated bet to buck the industry.

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Sarwar Kashmeri is the author of the recently released book: America & Europe After 9/11 and Iraq: The Great Divide. He is a fellow of the Foreign Policy Association, a strategic communications adviser, and lives in Reading, Vt. Your comments may be posted on the Business Climate blog: www.sakbizcol.blogspot.com.