Hot on the heels of their announcement that they’ll be printing 12 million copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Scholastic is now saying that they’ll be 12 million environmentally friendly copies. The book is expected to tip the scales at 784 pages (in line with previous volumes in the series), meaning that Scholastic will be using about 16,700 tons of paper for the print run. They’ve promised that the paper used will contain “a minimum of 30 percent post-consumer waste fiber.” Additionally, about two-thirds of the paper will be approved by the Forest Stewardship Council, an international organization with a mission to “promote environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.” Finally, the deluxe edition (which has a scheduled first printing of 100,000 copies), will be printed on paper that contains “100 percent post-consumer waste fiber.”
These announcements may be in response to complaints by environmental groups that followed the publication of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in 2005. They claimed that Scholastic hadn’t used enough recycled paper, and urged consumers to buy copies from the Canadian publisher, Raincoast Books. Scholastic wouldn’t say how much recycled paper they were using, but did say they didn’t use paper from ancient or endangered forests, and they still managed to sell 6.9 million copies in the first 24 hours.