Subscription option is available on Eco-Libris website

We would like to remind you with an option that is available onEco-Libris' website - subscription.

If you have a big library at home and you want to green it up one bookshelf or bookcase at a time, balancing out 5 or 10 books every month on regular basis, can be a good fit for you.

The process is very easy and similar to one-time purchase: On the subscription page you choose how many books you want to balance out each month. Then just click on the 'Buy' bottom and complete the payment process on the PayPal page. That's it.

Then, every month we'll balance out for you the amount of books you chose by planting trees in developing countries with our planting partners. You will receive a confirmation email from PayPal following the monthly payment, and of course you will also receive our stickers on monthly basis.

If and when you'll decide that you want to suspend your subscription, you will be able to do it easily and quickly on PayPal website.

We are very happy to offer this option to all the eco-conscious readers out there who want to balance out many books but want to do gradually. If you have any questions about the subscription option, please feel free to email me at: raz [at] ecolibris [dot] net.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

A new book, "The Secret Green Sauce", by Bill Roth is going green with Eco-Libris

We are happy to announce on a new collaboration with Bill Roth on his new book - THE SECRET GREEN SAUCE™ : Best Practices being used by actual businesses to grow green profits.

Roth, Green Business Coach for Entrepreneur.com and the founder of Earth 2017, partnered with Eco-Libris in the past to green up his important book, "On Empty (Out of Time)".

Now he has a new and a very exciting book entitled "The Secret Green Sauce" and now we're happy to collaborate with him again, planting one tree for every copy sold! Readers will also receive with their copy our "One tree planted for this book" sticker they can put on the book.

"The Secret Green Sauce" profiles the best practices being used by actual companies to grow green revenues. Bill Roth assembled these best practices through a two-year effort of searching from and interviewing, the business pioneers who are successfully building green businesses and launching green products.

Bill Roth is offering a FREE 1st chapter on Earth 2017 website. The book is available for sale both in a paper and electronic versions on the website at www.earth2017.com/free-the-secret-green-sauce

I'm already reading it and I find it very innovative and interesting. We'll soon post here a review of the book, as well as an interview with Bill Roth on his book, so stay tuned!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Green printing tip no. 23: Are there inexpensive Green papers for brochures?

We have another tip for you on our weekly series of green printing tips, where we bring you information on green printing in collaboration with Greg Barber, an experienced eco-friendly printer.

Today Greg continues a 4-part series that is focusing on paper and paper companies and writes about one of the most well known eco-friendly papers.

Are there inexpensive Green papers for brochures?

Tip #23

I started my paper discussions with Mohawk and Neenah in the past two weeks and this week I want to bring you up to date with Cascades, and the number one question I am asked.

Cascades, formerly known as Rolland Paper, from Canada, was one of the first paper mills that I featured, along my 20 year mission. They developed one of the first 100% post-consumer waste papers, and that grade was called New Life DP. For many years I sold that grade to the government under a GSA contract I was awarded.

Approximately two years ago, Rolland became Cascades, and New Life DP became Enviro 100. I certainly agreed with the new name, and Enviro is one of my favorite environmental papers.

The reasons are:

1. Enviro prints well.
2. Enviro is third party certified for 100% PCW and 100% PCF.
3. Enviro has terrific bulk in their text & cover weights.
4. Enviro is "priced" to compete against non environmental papers.
5. Enviro comes in 20# for Xerox and laser work.
6. Enviro has good opacity.
7. Enviro has been my house sheet for 10 years and we have gotten rave reviews from many of our clients.

Enviro comes in 50#,60#, 70#, 80# and 100# text and 80# and 100# cover, as well as the 20# for Xerox jobs.

When young designers ask me if they can switch their clients to being environmental and be price competitive, I tell them Enviro is priced like an inexpensive opaque paper, but prints like an expensive text line. I have an example on my website at www.gregbarberco.com of saving one client $7000, on the paper alone on a brochure job, that needed 5000 pounds of paper. The
savings on Enviro was the reason we both got the job.

The Cascades mill uses BioGas for their energy. They are FSC certified, and they are less than 10 hours from our market, which helps the carbon footprint.

As I mentioned, I have a very good experience with the Enviro - I have done jobs for Diesel Jeans, Feed LLC, Gaia Soil, several art galleries, and many colleges and universities. I also sold to the EPA, and the U.S Fish & Wildlife the 20# paper, during my GSA contract days, with great results.

Interested? Call me (or email me at greg@ecofriendlyprinter.com) for samples.

Also, if you have any questions you would like us to address in future tips please email us to info@ecolibris.net .

Latest tips:

Green Printing Tip #22 - What does I-Tone mean?

Green Printing Tip #21 - What new developments have surfaced in Green papers?

Green Printing Tip #20 - How to create a green packaging job?

Green Printing Tip #19 - How can graphic designers make a difference and green up your printing jobs?

You can find links to all the tips we published so far on our green printing tips page, which is part of our green printing tools & resources.

You can also find further valuable information on Greg Barber Company's website - http://www.gregbarberco.com.

Yours,

Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green printing!

Looking for a unique and affordable green birthday gift?

What's the connection between Leonardo DiCaprio, Charles Manson and actresses Calista Flockhart (or should we say Ally McBeal) and Demi Moore?

They were all born on November 11! If you're also celebrating your birthday today - happy birthday to you too!

We love birthdays and therefore we're happy to remind you of the option to celebrate a birthday of friends, family members, colleagues and anyone you care about with Eco-Libris!

Eco-Libris is offering you now to plant trees to balance out the books of your loved ones who celebrate their birthday. Not only that new trees will be planted to balance out their books, but they will also receive our stickers with a beautiful birthday card made of recycled paper. And we also try to keep it affordable - the added charge for the birthday card is only $1.5.

All you need to do is to choose how many of the birthday person's books you want to balance out on our special birthday gift page (http://www.ecolibris.net/birthday.asp), change the shipping address on the payment page to the address of the gift receiver and we will take care of the rest!

This is also a great green add-on if you're buying a book as a gift for the birthday person, especially if you're buying her or him a green book.

The birthday cards we send are made by Doodle Greetings (see picture above of one of their cards). Not only these cards come with a beautiful design, but they are also eco-friendly - printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and are made chlorine-free and acid free. Sounds like a good fit with Eco-Libris stickers!

And of course, if it's your birthday and you want to give yourself a green gift - get yourself a nice green book and plant a tree for it with us!

Happy Birthday!
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting sustainable reading!

Welcome to the Green Books campaign!

Our Green Books campaign is online! Today over 100 bloggers are taking a stand to support books printed in an eco-friendly manner by simultaneously publishing reviews of more than 100 such books.

Organized by Eco-Libris, this campaign is aiming to promote “green” books by reviewing more than 100 books printed on recycled paper or FSC-certified paper.

All the links to the books and the blogs that participate in the campaign and the blogs reviewing them are available on the campaign's page at www.ecolibris.net/greenbookscampaign.asp

We invite you to join us in this unique green lit celebration, read reviews of books you find interesting, comment, tweet (please add the hashtag #greenbooks to your tweet/s) and share it with other book lovers!

We also want to take this opportunity and thank all the bloggers who participate in the campaign, as well as the publishers and authors who provided the great green books reviewed today. And last but not least, thank you to Susan Newman that designed the beautiful logo for the campaign.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Green Books campaign: No Impact Man

This review is part of the Green Books campaign. Today 100 bloggers are reviewing 100 great books printed in an environmentally friendly way. Our goal is to encourage publishers to get greener and readers to take the environment into consideration when purchasing books. This campaign is organized by Eco-Libris, a a green company working to green up the book industry by promoting the adoption of green practices, balancing out books by planting trees, and supporting green books. A full list of participating blogs and links to their reviews is available on Eco-Libris website.

The book we review on the Green Books campaign is:

No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process

Author: Colin Beavan

Beavan is a PhD electronic engineer (University of Liverpool). He spent the late 80s and early 90s as a consultant to philanthropic organizations such as social housing providers, drug treatment agencies and hospitals, helping them to promote themselves in order to secure increasingly scarce, Thatcher-era funding.

In 1992 Beavan returned to the United States and wrote for magazines until Hyperion published his first book Fingerprints: The Origins of Crime Detection and the Murder Case that Launched Forensic Science (a popular history of criminology) in 2001. In 2006, Viking published his second book, Operation Jedburgh: D-Day and America’s First Shadow (about the operation that formed the precedent for U.S. anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan).

He is director of the No Impact Project, a visiting scholar at NYU, an advisor to the University’s Sustainability Task Force, and sits on the board of directors of New York City’s Transportation Alternatives and on the advisory council of Just Food.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published on: September 2009

What this book is about? (from the publisher's website)
guilty liberal finally snaps, swears off plastic, goes organic, becomes a bicycle nut, turns off his power, and generally becomes a tree-hugging lunatic who tries to save the polar bears and the rest of the planet from environmental catastrophe while dragging his baby daughter and Prada-wearing, Four Seasons–loving wife along for the ride. And that’s just the beginning. Bill McKibben meets Bill Bryson in this seriously engaging look at one man’s decision to put his money where his mouth is and go off the grid for one year—while still living in New York City—to see if it’s possible to make no net impact on the environment. In other words, no trash, no toxins in the water, no elevators, no subway, no products in packaging, no air-conditioning, no television . . .

What would it be like to try to live a no-impact lifestyle? Is it possible? Could it catch on? Is living this way more satisfying or less satisfying? Harder or easier? Is it worthwhile or senseless? Are we all doomed or can our culture reduce the barriers to sustainable living so it becomes as easy as falling off a log? These are the questions at the heart of this whole mad endeavor, via which Colin Beavan hopes to explain to the rest of us how we can realistically live a more “eco-effective” and by turns more content life in an age of inconvenient truths.

What we think about it?

I thought that a good preparation for reading the book would be to watch again "The Story of Stuff". At the end of this excellent 20-minute animation of the consumerist society, Anne Leonard who narrates it is saying "let's create something new". Colin Beavan definitely tried to do that in his one year experiment, which he writes about in his book.

Both the story of Stuff and the No Impact Man project are actually a mirror of our society and what we see there is not a pretty picture. We see a rat race that is ruining the planet and the same time doesn't provide us the happiness and good life we expect to have out of it. Beavan is looking to change it , adopting the wood-harvesting philosophy of the Menominee tribe of "living happily, taking from the planet what it can sustainably offer and not taking what it can't."

He is not a hippie. No sir. He might be a rebel, but he is a rebel living in New York, which makes everything a bit more realistic for the average urban reader. It's true that some of Beavan's experiences describes in the book might be too extreme for some of us, and for him as well, as he explores his limits with electricity for example and finds out that life can be too difficult without using a washing machine. But at the same time, he teaches us a very important lesson on how we tend to blame everyone else in not doing enough to fight global warming, politicians, businesses and even family members and friends, but we rarely look inside and see how much we contribute to it with our daily life routine, the same one Beavan tries to drastically change.

This book is a fascinating journey, both personal and social, and you learn so much not only about the Beavan family, but also about yourself and the society you live in. What I liked about it even more is that he finds a perfect balance between providing us with facts, philosophical ideas and historic perspective and keeping the story interesting and funny and avoiding from making it just one of those "how-to" educational guides.

For me this book was a perfect choice for our green books campaign not only because it is printed responsibly on 100% post-consumer recycled paper and cardboard and processed without chlorine, but also because Colin Beavan believes we can make a difference, and this is what this campaign is all about.

Bottom line: Written with wit wisdom and two feet on the ground, this book is far from being an urban green fantasy and has and is greatly recommended!

Disclosure: We received a copy of this book from the publisher.

GIVEAWAY ALERT!!

We're giving away our review copy of the book, courtesy of the publisher, and of course a tree will be planted for the copy!

How you can win? Please add a comment below and share with us what's the most extreme sacrifice you did to green up your lifestyle. Submissions are accepted until Tuesday, November 17, 12PM EST. The winner will be announced the following day.

If you're looking for other interesting green-themed books, you are invited to check out our green books page on Eco-Libris website's green resources section.
Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!

Is REDD going bad? Is it going to enable conversion of natural forests into industrial plantations?

Last month we had a 3-part series on the potential and risks of forest-based carbon credits following the growing discussion about the Deforestation and Degradation in developing countries (REDD) mechanism. Now it looks like the risks part should to be updated.

Bloomberg reported about a proposal that was made during the climate talks in Bangkok last month didn’t include wording to protect natural forests from being used to cultivate managed woodlands. In other words, carbon credits will be given also to those who wish to convert large-scale natural forests into industrial plantations.

According to Mongabay.com, the provision, which included safeguards against the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations, was removed the negotiating text during the final session at climate talks in Bangkok. The European Union, backed by Democratic Republic of the Congo and other Congo Basin countries, blocked reinstatement of the conversion safeguard, despite strong requests to do so from Brazil, India, Mexico, Switzerland, Norway, and more than a dozen other countries.

Environmentalists say that without the provision, forestry companies could receive REDD payments for logging tropical forests and replacing them with single-species plantations, which are biologically impoverished and store less carbon relative to natural forests.

Some observers described this move as a tactic one and were quite sure this provision, which included "the words “against the conversion of natural forests to forest plantations,” will be added eventually to whatever proposal will hopefully will be approved in Copenhagen next month.

In the meantime, the talks which ended Barcelona didn't provide any encouraging signs about it as REDD-Monitor reports today. It quotes Roman Czebiniak, political advisor on climate change and forests for Greenpeace International, who told SolveClimate that “Right now, we have a pretty worthless safeguard and no rules to implement it, at a time when we need strong safeguards and strong rules are needed.”

Zebiniak remains optimistic that safeguards and monitoring could still be inserted into a REDD agreement, even after Copenhagen, and we also keep our fingers crossed that this mechanism, which as we reported last month has a promising potential, won't becme worthless because of political agendas and lack of will to make sure it will benefit the environment and not just couple of big forestry companies.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Promoting sustainable reading!