Bound for Recycling

In late 2010, the National Wildlife Federation (NWF) was awarded a generous grant from the McGraw-Hill Cos. to develop and conduct a pilot textbook recycling and research project that would benefit McGraw-Hill’s sustainability commitment NewPage Corp.’s desire to increase recovered fiber in the U.S. as well as the NWF’s environmental education and sustainability programs, Eco- Schools USA and Campus Ecology.
 

Goal

For the purposes of this project, we focused on the K-12 educational sector, the higher education sector and book publishers. The intent of our report is to highlight the life cycle of textbooks, from production through disposal, and to provide needed information and recommendations to interested sectors on how they might establish a textbook recycling program at their school, university or in their community.
 

Scope

What we found through our research was rather staggering. More than 4.3 billion books are produced annually in the U.S. for a variety of sectors. Unfortunately, many books—after they have reached the end of their useful lives—end up in landfills.

To address this, the NWF, McGraw-Hill and NewPage Corp. entered into a collaborative project to study textbook recycling in the U.S., pilot a recycling project and develop best practices to increase textbook recycling. This report, “A Research Study on Textbook Recycling in America: Recommendations for Proper Disposal and Repurposing at the End of a Textbook’s Useful Life,” available online at www.nwf.org/Eco-Schools-USA/Our-Partners/Textbook-Recycling-Program.aspx, is based on what currently happens to textbooks at the end of their useful lives. While the original assumption was that recycling books would be challenging, the research indicates that it requires discipline, structure, organization, an outlet and method for disposal and processing of books and a change in behavior when it comes to educating the public.

With more than 150,000 K-12 schools and 4,100 higher education institutions, the market for educational textbooks is significant. Our research showed that K-12 schools want to recycle textbooks but do not have enough information on how to institute a recycling program. And, for higher education institutions, many have paper recycling programs, but textbooks are not included in their mix. Most community recycling programs tend to focus on materials that are commonly recycled, such as copy paper, aluminum and steel cans, plastics and glass. Additionally, single-stream recycling is being adopted by an increasing number of American communities with mandates to increase diversion rates.

 

Results

By surveying K-12 schools, we found that more than 57 percent participate in book donation or “give away” programs and that 37 percent said they store obsolete textbooks because they are unsure what to do with them from a disposal standpoint. By surveying higher education institutions, we found more than 36 percent said they did recycle both hardbound and softbound textbooks, but 26 percent said they recycled neither.

Our team also spent a considerable amount of time researching the life cycle of textbooks. What we found is that there is significant fragmentation and diversity in the ways that educational institutions collect and process textbooks for recycling. To help alleviate that, we provided guidelines and best practices for educational institutions that we hoped would help them to facilitate the recovery of textbooks instead of landfilling them. These guidelines include education; establishment of a recycling mission, goals and objectives; communication; planning; facilitation; implementation; and evaluation.

After all, an unusable or unwanted book is a terrible thing to waste.

The author is senior director of Eco-Schools USA, a program of the National Wildlife Federation. Email her at hickey@nwf.org.