Broadview’s 2020 Recycled Paper Usage and Charitable Donations

At Broadview Press we continue to be reflective about the impact our business has in ways that go beyond the bottom line. We believe that ethical conduct is not only compatible with sound business practices but also an essential obligation for companies such as ours. Our commitment to ethical conduct carries through to all aspects of our operations, from the selection of books that we publish to the choice of paper on which we print those books. We aim to always extend fair treatment to our authors, our staff, our freelancers, our suppliers, the professors who adopt our books, and the students who purchase and read our books; we also aim to minimize our environmental impact.

Recycled Paper

Our use of recycled and FSC-certified paper is an aspect of ethical business practices that we are able to track quantitatively for this report. For many years now, nearly all Broadview books with paper weights of 40lbs or greater (what is considered the “standard” paper-weight range for books) have been printed on FSC-certified and at least partially recycled paper, with the majority of these being printed on 100% recycled paper; credit should go to our Managing Editor, Tara Lowes, for applying this printing policy.

As the figures below show, however, while the number of individual titles (including both new titles and reprints) printed on recycled and FSC-certified paper is fairly high, ranging from 84-91% annually, the number of pages printed on recycled and FSC-certified paper is much lower, ranging from 56-68% of all pages printed. The barrier we’ve come up against is that longer books such as the Broadview Anthology of British Literature, The Broadview Introduction to Literature, and The Broadview Anthology of Social and Political Thought, which have high page counts and are often printed in large quantities, must use very thin paper in order to remain reasonably light and portable.

There is very low demand for recycled or FSC-certified paper that is also thin, and to our knowledge it is not available from any Canadian printers. Given this availability problem, it does not seem likely that we will be able to increase the percentage of Broadview pages printed on recycled and FSC-certified paper in the near future, though we remain committed to seeking these options wherever possible.

Summary of printing on recycled and FSC paper:

Charitable Donations

Broadview Press has given 2% of 2020 profits to charity. We are listing some of the recipients here in the hopes that it might inspire others to explore and donate to these worthy causes.

1% of our annual after-tax profits have been directed to three organizations focused on improving educational opportunities for disadvantaged Black and Indigenous students: The Shannen’s Dream campaign run by the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada; The Umoja Community ; and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

In 2020 we also began donating a portion of revenue from several titles to charity, including giving a royalty on The Ethics of Pandemics and Concepts and Cases in Nursing Ethics 4e to Doctors Without Borders to assist in the fight against COVID-19, and a royalty on sales of books highlighting topics of racial justice to organizations that include the Equal Justice Initiative, Color of Change, Black Lives Matter, and The Movement for Black Lives.

We have also made donations to the following charities: Action Against Hunger, The International Conservation Fund of Canada, The Citizen’s Foundation Canada, Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies, Feed Ontario, Food Banks BC, Feed Nova Scotia, and The Calgary Food Bank.

Posted on April 22, 2021

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