There’s no easy definition of sustainability, and no definitive checklist of what a publisher ‘must’ do in order to produce a sustainable photobook.

Rebecca Lardeur (RL): Sustainability is a big word that means many things; it depends on your context and where you are and what is available. It’s important to define what sustainability is to you, and what your ambitions are, because then that allows you to make decisions. So if biodiversity means more for you, or if social justice means more for you, then those decisions become easier.

For the Climate and Cities collective, two principles helped to guide their book making process:

RL: Where is fossil fuel in the making process? And how do I make sure that I do not rely on it if we are to go towards a fossil fuel free future? The other method is a circular economy, which really, truly helps to reduce the pressure on biodiversity. The circular economy has principles like designing out waste and pollution, making things last, and regenerating nature. So we ended up with those two main guidelines when we started making.

Making sustainable choices is about more than personal politics. A good photobook is also an aesthetic object, and intangible qualities like the look and feel of a particular paper, for instance, are also important when selecting sustainable materials. 

Tiffany Jones (TJ): I have a library of samples that are returned to over and over again. I often use papers that I've used before so I know how well they reproduce images, and the quality, the longevity of the paper, the feel of the paper. It's good to build yourself a resource list and use that to make your decisions. I do regular research and just feel as many books as I can, it's all about feel for me, and recycled papers are great for that...  There's also a huge difference between coated and uncoated paper. In most instances, the uncoated paper would be more sustainable.

Decisions about sustainability also vary widely by location. What sort of materials and resources are available locally? How far do your books have to travel? And what can your market afford? Publishers in the Global North have access to a wide range of resources – including papers specifically made for photographic reproduction – and  a comparatively wealthy customer base. As Martin Bollati explains, however, publishers in the Global South often need to keep production closer to home in order to make books that  local customers can afford to buy:

Martin Bollati (MB): There’s a difficulty in translating the price of some decisions that are going to make the book more expensive. The market is already very limited. So it's quite a dilemma to take on these decisions, you know, like thinking about using sustainable paper. I think that we can all agree that the most sustainable paper is the paper that is produced nearest to you. It’s about balancing priorities. I work with two types of paper which are locally produced in Argentina. Even if I wanted to use [sustainably manufactured] International Paper, the cost is almost impossible to translate to the book. So the problems bring the solution, which is using local paper. 

How can publishers balance the cost of sustainable production with the affordability and accessibility of their books? Is there a case to be made for higher-priced books? Artist Maren Krings worked with manufacturer Hahnemühle to develop a bespoke hemp-based paper for her book H is for Hemp. The paper itself is highly sustainable, but a near-monopoly at certain stages of production substantially increased the cost of the final product:  

Maren Krings (MK): There's only one pulping company; it’s in Spain. So we have material transported from the Netherlands and from France, where most hemp is being grown, down to Spain, where the pulp is made. And from there, it's distributed worldwide. There’s an absolute monopoly on the pulping of the hemp material. … we're actually trying to set up a system where we have smaller pulping factories distributed all over Europe, which are very close to the main areas that are producing it, which potentially could really solve the problem. … but at the moment, this paper is about four times more expensive than some of the most expensive papers for photobook printing, which is something that most artists will not be able to accept or won't even be able to really integrate into their practice.

Hitting the sweet spot of sustainability and affordability means balancing a range of different metrics – distance, quantities, cost, and expectations. Should the price of individual books be offset by printing more? And what about the carbon footprint at each stage of the process? Moving materials back and forth during production can contribute significantly to the overall environmental impact.

TJ:  One of the things that I think everyone can do is optimise the book size for the paper that they're printing on. So that's one of the first things you can do to keep prices down. Also, use papers that your printer may have in stock, recycled papers or papers that they don't have to have shipped in from a long way off, because that adds a lot of expense as well.

MB: I think one of the biggest problems in book production is not having a clear idea of your distribution capacities. So if you're doing your first book, maybe you go and print 500 - 1000 books, and then you sell 80 or 100. And then you have to store all these extra books, which is a problem that actually happens a lot for people who don't have experience in printing. I think it’s better to begin printing in smaller batches, to test the capacities of distribution of books that you make. I think it's common for people to have this super enthusiasm for having their first book printed – and then to have boxes in back with half of the production that hasn't been sold. 

Sustainability requires zooming in and zooming out… understanding our common global issues, and then zooming into each geographic location to understand how it plays out at a local level.

RL: We used two free tools to measure the carbon footprint of our book, and I'm very happy to say we've estimated one kilo of carbon per book. When you look on Google at the average emissions per book of Penguin books, they are around three kilos per book, and what we have done is around one third of that, so it's doable to reduce, which is what we need. The freight and the travel were quite surprising for us because we had [made] a lot of effort, only travelling with public transport in London, but it still ended up being a bit less than a quarter of the overall footprint. We printed everything in house with Folium, so it [printing , assembling and binding] was all done in one place. Taking the scientific approach of measuring to understand where to prioritise is extremely helpful to make sure that when you do something, even if it is not precise it will be accurate enough for you to make decisions. 

MK: With H is for Hemp, if I had driven to the printing site to oversee the printing process, it would have been another 500 kilometres. We chose to have a glue binding instead of the open stitched Swiss brochure binding because that would have required the book to be printed, and then shipped somewhere else to be bound, then sent back to the original printers to have the cover put on it. We decided the glue binding is something that the printer can already do in-house because they have the facility ready for that. So there were a lot of changes on the actual format of the book that were absolutely directed by what the least impactful way was to produce this book... Understanding your supply chain issues is like checking off your pyramid of priorities. So if you have local things being produced, then you need to look at them in terms of recyclability, and how toxic they are.  I also want to mention FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) labels. I recommend everybody to at least be aware that they're not really what they're promising to be.

The increasing overlap between virtual and real worlds presents a whole new range of opportunities for photobook makers. Something that's been raised a number of times in discussions about photobooks and sustainability is the question of distributed printing. Rather than printing a book in one location and shipping physical copies, the designer  would create a file that could be sent digitally, to another part of the world, and printed there. The excitement of being ‘on press’ with a publisher – for many, an integral part of the book making process – is one that some photographic artists may be reluctant to give up.  What some might perceive as a  loss of creative control, however, can also be seen as a chance to develop new kinds of working models, and new kinds of relationships. 

MK: [Distributed printing] was one of the processes we were trying with H is for Hemp. The original idea was to take the PDF file and then send it over to the United States and then have the book for the US demand produced in the US. But a lot of the printing houses do not want to take on that challenge of basically producing an artwork without the artists being present. Plus, as an artist, you have zero input, you can't influence the process, you do not even know what's going to be shipped out to your clients. So it is a little bit of a new approach to bookmaking. But I think, eventually, we will probably have to let that losing control process happen in order to go more sustainable routes. 

Rethinking the photobook as something that could  be co-created by someone else and printed in a different location without the artist on-site presents a whole new set of challenges for designers. At the same time, it raises potential problems with reproduction rights and copyright of the authors. How far, for instance, would the artist or publisher specify the types of inks and papers? Beyond conventional issues around quality control, how would you ensure that sustainable choices are made in different locations? 

MB: Most of SED’s books have an open source printing format when they’re published online; you can download a printing file, and you can print it, like I do at home or with a local printer. So I think that at least part of this commitment begins with being generous. I know this is not a complete solution for the book process, but I think it opens a gap, right? I think this can also be explored as a commercial model. The book might cost 30 dollars but you can download it for free and make it yourself by alternatives. I think there's something there that can be explored a lot more than it is.

MK: [Distributed printing is] difficult because you have to be a super niche expert in literally every single continent, and to know which are the most sustainable papers and printing inks that you can get your hands on in each location. So I think we probably have to open our thoughts much more into collaborative efforts and really cooperating with each other, because there's an expert in each country. This is one of the benefits that's coming out of globalisation.  

Are digital books a possible solution? The production of digital books doesn't involve paper, and it doesn't involve shipping things back and forth. But the hidden environmental impact of digitally circulated content is more significant than most people imagine. 

RL: It's still a new area of research that I'm personally very interested in, but it's very much an innovative space where we are dealing with a lot of uncertainty and error margins. In terms of [the energy used by] data centres, it really depends on the country where it's hosted, and where the energy they’re using is coming from. And how much embodied carbon is in your ebook reader or your laptop? How many times do you need to use your MacBook to read, to make that carbon footprint the same as a book? Think of all the heavy metal and lithium that is in your Mac. So it's a work in progress; that information is quite hard to get. At the moment, no one knows.

MK: I'm living off grid right now, getting all my energy from the solar panels that I have up here. And it was actually up here that I realised how heavy my footprint is when it comes down to running off external hard drives to keep my computer going all day. I was running everything off my mobile data – I had 80 gigabytes on my phone plan until I started living here, and then I had to change that, because I couldn't get through a month with 80 gigabytes of mobile data due to phone use,  Zoom conferences and everything. Sometimes you have to do these kind of self-experiments to realise where we create these footprints. 

The move towards a more sustainable future presents opportunities for rethinking our practices and priorities as artists, and the value we place on each stage of the creative process. It will require shifting our habits and expectations about what we are making and consuming, and why. At the same time environmental concerns need to be balanced with the joy of creating. Part of the move towards a sustainable future is also rethinking the way that we value objects in the long term, and what happens to them when they are no longer needed.

TJ: All the books that I make are made to last but to be used with care as well. But I think also, once you actually start using a book, it becomes far more personalised, and you can pass it on. Some of the books that I've made are actually quite fragile, but they can be rebuilt –  a centre-stitched or a hand bound book, anybody can fix it. So I kind of like the idea of imagining a book that can fall apart and still last forever, or for as long as possible; there's a lifetime that they should live, otherwise, why bother making one?

Sustainable publishing is a balancing act between the local and the global, on the part of both makers and readers.The books that each of these speakers have discussed showcase strategic ways of integrating sustainable thinking and sourcing into the publishing of high-quality, creative books. The participants have shown that working with scientific methods, as well as directly with industry, can help us to understand our resource use and prioritise where to make changes. Future solutions to the challenges could involve rethinking things like production values and creative control and embracing the nuances of local materials and processes.