Sustainability Policy – Renard Press

RENARD PRESS feels strongly that, in 2024, we cannot ignore our impact on the planet, so the following are the biggest areas we feel need addressing in the industry – and this, our promise to our readers, outlines what we’re doing to look after our environment. If you have any questions, please do get in touch.

We’re proud to be able to say that we’re one of the UK’s only carbon positive publishers, meaning we take more carbon out of the air than we put in. You can find out more about this below. ↓

Gone are the days of bubble-padded envelopes! In 2024, we’re all very aware of the single-use plastics in our lives – quite rightly, of course – so we use the more environmentally friendly cardboard ‘bookwrap’ to send out our books to reviewers and customers, and we plant a tree for every order.

Since we are committed to making beautiful physical objects, we do not print on recycled paper, which is known to yellow swiftly, but the papers we choose all have high sustainability credentials. You can also find out more about the papers we use to make our hand-bound editions here. We work with a carbon-neutral printer, who offset all of their emissions.

Publishing is often referred to as a ‘game of risk’, since it takes a lot of experience and an educated guess to work out how many books to print. Often publishers print in huge volumes, but then have to pulp the books – we maintain a slimmer stock so that as few books as possible are wasted in this way, and our distributor uses carbon-neutral delivery options for sending stock to bookshops.

A slightly less obvious way in which we can measure our carbon footprint is in the energy we use – which is why Renard computers run on 100% renewable energy, and the heating, when we need it, uses 100% carbon-neutral gas.

Carbon positive publishing

There is no denying the climate crisis, and we all have a part to play in fixing the problem.

Renard is proud to be one of the UK’s first carbon positive publishers, which means we take more carbon out of the air than we put in.

We measure our impact in three ways:

• We reduce our emissions, we use green energy, we work with suppliers with green credentials and we cut out waste in our supply chain and production
• We calculate the carbon that has not been offset by a supplier and offset it
• We plant a tree for every order we receive via our website, creating a forest with Ecologi

Sustainable Development Goals

We are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. Launched in collaboration with the International Publishers Association, the Compact is designed to inspire action among publishers and aims to accelerate progress to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Signatories aspire to develop sustainable practices and act as champions of the SDGs during the Decade of Action (2020–2030), publishing books and journals that will help inform, develop, and inspire action in that direction.

In signing the Compact we commit to actively promoting and publishing on themes represented by the Sustainable Development Goals, and we will help to spread the word about and encourage adoption of the SDGs among those we work with.