Sustainability
Book Waste
According to a 2012 National Wildlife Federation-sponsored report over 320 million books, totaling 640,000 tons are sent to landfill each year in North America alone. Paper counts for 26% of landfill waste of landfills throughout the world.
Unsold Books
While data for Canada is difficult to find, Maastrict Diplomat reported that 30-40% of books produced in the United States in 2009 were returned unsold from bookstores to the publisher. From that, 65-95% of those returns were pulped, using precious resources to be returned into the slurry from where they came.
Impact to forests
In one year 32 million trees are used to produce books in North America. According to Words Rated, more than 160,000 truck loads of unread books are wasted each year and 10 million trees are wasted for the production of these unread books.