Environmentalism and Sustainability
Proudly Built From The Ground Up With Environmentalism As A Central Tenent
Can We Help Even Further?
We are looking to provide an economic one-stop-shop of environmentally conscious services for authors who share our passions. If you are looking for a specific service and cannot find environmentally conscious providers, feel welcome to let us know (even if the service is outside of our traditional offerings) and we will see if we can help!
Our current offerings are designed to not only have a positive environmental impact but to exponentially scale (part of why we invest in 3x our webhosting green energy needs). As part of this, we proudly offer a scalable discount depending on your own environmental efforts.
Our Story
We are proud to be a company that puts the planet first. At Authors Platforms, we know that every small step towards sustainability counts, and that's why we've made it our mission to minimize our ecological footprint in everything we do.
Our founder comes from a background in outdoor environmental education and eco-tourism, which includes creating awarded school camp programmes and supporting a Dark Sky Reserve accreditation initiative. This passion for nature and the environment is at the heart of everything we do, and we hope that you will join us in our mission to create a better future for our planet.
Book Publishing
We are committed to promoting sustainability in the publishing industry, which is why we have carefully selected printing partners that shares our values for the printing of our books along with our customers. Therefore every book you purchase from us or our authors supports our ongoing environmentalism, so thank you!
Our printers use eco-friendly materials and practices to minimize the environmental impact of our products. All of our book paper is certified sustainably sourced, processed to be acid-free to increase book quality and shelf life, and we use eco-friendly inks to print our materials. Our printing facilities focus on energy conservation and are certified to offset 100% of their carbon emissions.
Libraries
As part of our commitment to sustainability, we support libraries by donating books and offering them at a discounted rate. By making our books available to libraries, we help to reduce the need for additional copies to be produced and promote sustainability in the publishing industry. We also encourage our customers to donate their books to libraries when they are no longer needed, reducing waste and ensuring that the books will continue to be used by others.
Shipping
By using print-on-demand technology, we only print what is needed, reducing excess inventory and minimizing waste. Then we work with printing centers globally to print as close to the end customer as possible, reducing shipping distances and emissions, as well as eliminating the emissions of book warehousing. We use eco-friendly packaging wherever possible including 100% recycled and recyclable corrugated boxes and padded mailers.
Any residual carbon emissions from shipping we then offset by default through our carbon-neutral shipping program.
Green Web Hosting
We exclusively use web hosting (for both ourselves and our clients) with a 300% green hosting initiative. This not only offsets our energy consumptions but supplies the excess of renewable energy back into the grid. Without even purchasing from us our our clients, by just viewing websites of ours and our authors, you are supporting this effort to reduce carbon emissions and promote renewable energy.
So thank you for your help!
Office Practices
In addition to our website and shipping, we run a paperless office with staff composting (much of which becomes organic fertilizer personally used by staff). By minimizing our paper usage, we reduce the impact of our operations on the world’s forests.
At present, we encourage tele-commuting, green travel, energy efficiency and offsetting emissions in our office operations. We do not currently run renewable electricity in our office but we are investigating cost effective solutions currently.
Local Initiatives
Finally, we are always looking for ways to get involved with local environmental initiatives. Our founder’s background in outdoor environmental education has given us a unique perspective on the environmental challenges facing our community. We have worked with local organizations to promote environmental awareness, and we will continue to do so in the future.
To go further, we send staff on paid volunteering replanting days locally and/or donate to restoration projects in countries where we do not have staff.