Are Your Comics Contributing to Global Warming?
This musing was brought up by an article in the Wall Street Journal, blogged by Jeff Matthews, on how Staples was no longer going to be doing business with Asia Pulp and Paper because of environmental concerns.
The article detailed why:
In the past, [Asia Pulp and Paper] has said it is moving toward relying for all of its wood on plantation trees but needs to cut natural forest to maintain production levels.
APP runs one of Asia’s largest pulp mills on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and has operations in China. The retailers worry that APP is destroying natural rainforest to feed its mills.
Concerns over rainforest destruction have been heightened in recent months because new data show that Indonesia is the world’s third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas, behind the U.S. and China. Fires set to clear natural forests and forested peat swamps after they have been logged are the major cause of those emissions.
APP last year sought permission to use an environmentally friendly logo issued by the Forest Stewardship Council. In October, after inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about APP’s planned use of the logo, the FSC barred the company from using it.
The problem is that a lot of comic books and graphic novels are being published in China, South Korea, and Indonesia, from a variety of smaller printers that are bundled and sold by larger printing firms here in the United States to publishers of all sizes, from the smallest of independents up to Marvel.
Does any production person for any company want to shed any light on this? More to the point, with multiple layers and language barriers between the comics publishers and the actual printers, can anybody reliably answer that they’re sure their books aren’t made from clear-cutters?
