SFI OKs Walch Education Books

If you're up on your sustainability acronyms, then you know that SFI stands for Sustainable Forestry Initiative. And you know that, along with FSC (Forest Stewardship Council), they're one of the major organizations that certify whether wood products come from sustainably managed forests.

As a publisher, we use a lot of wood products, i.e. paper. We use less than we used to, because more and more of our titles are available as CD-ROMs or digital downloads. Plus, our on-site digital printing allows us to minimize the amount of paper (and books) we keep on on-hand in our warehouse. But we still use a lot of paper. And we're headquartered in Maine, the most heavily-forested state (by percentage of overall land) in the country. So we're particularly sensitive to the need for sustainable forestry. That's why we were so pleased, this past week, to get approval from SFI to print our books on SFI-certified paper. As Chuck Thomas, our VP of Operations noted, it was a big step to get SFI certification earlier this year. Now we've taken the next big step: getting approval to use that certification on virtually all of our books. Beginning now, all of our new books, and all of the reprints of existing titles, will show the SFI logo on the copyright page. It may not look like much, but it indicates that we're trying to do our job to ensure that the forests we depend on will still be there, and be healthy, many many years from now.