Food Freedom is Compostable – Our Sustainability of Printing

At the heart of my being is the quest to live in integrity. For me, deep integrity is the alignment of my actions with my beliefs. Living in harmony with Earth, humanity and the plants and animals we share this home with is the essence of integrity. I walk the difficult balance between living in harmony on a personal level and carrying out a mission to shift our societal way of being.

There are no easy answers or clear rules on how to carry out this experiment with truth and integrity. Critical thought, self-observation and observation of our humanity are key practices in deciding what actions to take. Publishing this book was one of these actions that required deep thought. To choose my own path of existing harmoniously or to print a book and contribute to some destruction in the process?

I chose to publish the book with the highest level of integrity I could find, sacrificing as little as possible, with the belief that the impact this book has on you will far outweigh the impact of printing it. On that note, I’d like to share what I’ve done to bring this book to you in a relative state of integrity.

Order Food Freedom: A Year of Growing and Foraging 100% of My Food

This book is compostable. Meaning it can and will fully return to Earth. There are no plastics or toxic chemicals in the paper or cover. You can grow food with the compost made from this book. See How to Compost in the Empowerment Manual for a composting guide.
My intention is to one day return to the soil, as I hope this book will, too.

The paper and cover are made of 100 percent post-consumer waste materials. That means no trees were cut down to make this book. FSC Recycled Certified.

The paper and cover are acid-free, processed chlorine-free (PCF) and the paper is made in a mill fueled mainly with renewable biogas energy.

Printed with vegetable-based, low-VOC inks.

This book is printed by Sheridan. The paper is sourced from Sustana Solutions and the cover is sourced from Neenah Paper.
Paper: Sustana EnviroBook 50 lb. white
Centerfold: Rolland EnviroSatin 70 lb. (uncoated)
Cover: Neenah Environment PC 100 white smooth 80 lb. (uncoated)

The binding material is EVA glue, which is considered to be the most sustainable glue choice in the book industry and is said to be non-toxic. EVA (ethylene-vinyl acetate copolymer) is composed of products from the production of petroleum and natural gas and I would consider it a plastic. It is not biodegradable, but I would be okay with a quantity of book binding in my large compost pile, or I would simply pull the pages out of the book to compost and put the glue into the garbage can. Here is an article on EVA glue and the Wikipedia page with basic info.
These options are the best we know of and what we had access to at the time of printing to do no unnecessary harm in producing this quantity of books.

Ebook. This book is also available as an ebook. Although this does reduce industrial destruction in some ways, the digital world and our technological devices are fully intertwined in destruction as well.

We share gratitude to New Society Publishers, Milkweed Editions and Chelsea Green Publishing for setting the example for printing books with integrity and to Sheridan for offering these options of higher environmental integrity.

We researched the publishers with the highest sustainability printing ethics and these are who we found. We modeled our printing ethics there and wherever possible we strove to take it to the next level. We researched who they printed with and found these to be the best options on the market.

The main sustainability ethics we found to focus on based on their example were:

• Paper: Acid-free, processed chlorine free
• Paper: 100% post-consumer recycled, also 100% old growth forest-free/ Ancient Forest Friendly/ FSC certified)
• Printed with vegetable-based, low-VOC inks
• Cover: 100% post-consumer recycled. Even within researching the top sustainable printers, we found very little information on what they are doing for cover stock. Recycled cover stock seems not to be a part of the sustainability practice amongst even the more sustainable publishers and printers. With diligence we did manage to find 100% post-consumer recycled cover stock that was available.

A few additional notes:

What this Post-Consumer Recycled paper is: This is paper recycled in actual blue bins, by people who have used it first. This is 100% of the paper used to make the new paper, hence 100% PCR. Then they de-ink it. Then they pulp it. The products come out white. The 50# White is the state that it is in from that process and 55# Natural is dyed. So the white uses fewer resources and is our choice for sustainability over the “natural.” Sustana Solutions operates on renewable energy made from the landfill.

The Rolland EnviroSatin for the photo pages is the Sustana EnviroBook with a satin finish.

Read about Sheridan’s Sustainability Practices.

First Printing Notes:

The cover paper is uncoated, FSC and SFI Certified. Through diligent research, we found a 100% recycled cover option as well as a 30% recycled option. To our disheartenment, neither was available at time of printing or without a much larger order of books. See more on this below.

Cover: Domtar Lynx Opaque 65 lb. (uncoated)