Like every organisation, Exact Editions has a carbon footprint and with our ongoing sustainability and climate crisis a responsible company needs to take account of the environmental damage (and benefits) that may be attributable to the successful operation of the business.
There are now some widely shared methods for understanding the ways in which commerce and industry contribute to Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. One useful conceptual framework we owe to the Green House Gas Protocol which defines 3 ways for allocating and auditing these emissions. These are defined as 3 ‘scopes’: or three ways in which our burning of fossil fuels needs to be measured. Scope 1 emissions are directly attributable to the activity of the organisation or business from consuming hydrocarbons (burning gas or refuelling trucks and planes); Scope 2 emissions are indirect emissions which arise from purchasing other forms of energy (eg electricity which has not come from renewable sources); and Scope 3 emissions which are a vast and highly complex set of other indirect emissions (including much that is upstream or downstream from the business in question). For example with a conventional magazine business, indirect emissions through Scope 3 would need to take into account the carbon cost of the paper, printing, and finishing of beautiful printed issues, and also the downstream costs of shipping, displaying, for a proportion of the product ‘de-stocking’ and then destroying, unsold issues. Not forgetting also the fully downstream costs of the subscriber who pays for the magazine, and in the end rubbish collection from the home environment. Sorting out the Scope 3 emissions of any contemporary business is a highly sophisticated project (the Protocol recognises 15 categories although only for exceptionally large businesses will all 15 categories be relevant).
As it happens, with a high tech and purely service-based business such as Exact Editions, some chunky elements of economic activity can be removed from the analysis. Well over half the economic activity of this company are entirely attributable to the royalties we pay to publishers, the wages paid to staff and the taxes and rates paid to government. The eco effects of royalties, salaries and taxes are the proper responsibility of our partners, employees and the government. So “none of our business” when accounting for GHG emissions. As it happens the next largest chunk of our activity/costs relates to the computer resources and the cloud services that are needed for the digital solutions that we deliver for our publishing partners. So that really is our concern and we should be prepared to take full responsibility for it.
What are the potential GHG costs of the business model that Exact Editions uses to deliver subscriptions and resources for the 200+ magazines on the platform? Most of our computing costs are attributable to our use of cloud computing from Amazon’s AWS solutions. Can we be sure that our solutions running on AWS are broadly efficient and reasonable in the amount of GHG emissions generated? Amazon provides some help tackling these questions: through a Customer Carbon Footprint Tool. Using this Amazon measure we estimate that the Exact Editions use of AWS comes to just under 2 Kg of CO2 per month. Furthermore Amazon has, in the past, maintained a very strong commitment to sourcing its electricity from renewable sources, so the real emissions are perhaps even lower than the CO2 budgeted for. If we want to put this broadly reassuring data in some context, we should note that any low-budget airline flight in Europe is likely to ‘cost’ every passenger on the plane 100 Kg in his/her carbon budget, just for a hop to Copenhagen or Madrid (and there is currently zero possibility of obtaining aviation kerosene from renewables) , and any printing of a magazine edition with say ten thousand copies rolling into pallets will have a carbon impact in excess of 100Kg of GHG emissions. Note also that the carbon footprint of the average UK citizen is now c 5 tons pa and that figure is coming down fast (it used to be over 8 tons per capita, per annum, in the 1990s). So progress is being made and magazines whether printed or digital are only a small part of the challenge.
Of course these figures need to be treated with caution. They are approximate and based on averages and conjectures. We certainly should not rush away with a conviction that moving to digital is likely to be a big eco-advance. Nor have we considered the downstream costs of digital usage at the consumer end (though I am not convinced that they are likely to be great — in comparison to other forms of consumer entertainment or enjoyment). The main consideration is that the magazine industry will for a time continue to be both print-based and digital, and we need to manage the clear transition to more sustainable solutions by ensuring that the advantages of digital magazines are not brought at the cost of losing the value of the culture and the history that magazines continue to serve. This is one reason that Exact Editions attaches huge value to the potential of digital archives of magazines that were until about 2000 CE largely print and paper resources. The magazine industry is at least fortunate that its transition to a digital culture has every prospect of retaining much of value from its analog past.
The magazine industry is gradually adopting ‘greener’ technology and distribution solutions. This tendency can, and surely will, be consolidated as the climate emergency worsens. But there is an even more important consideration to bear in mind. Magazines through their content, their editorial and their advertising, play a part in educating and informing us all of the ecological challenges and opportunities we face. Magazines and periodicals with a steady flow of information should, and we expect will, play their part in shaping the discussion and the politics of agreed solutions. This makes for a sustainability “plus”.
Exact Editions helps digitise many magazines with content very relevant to the Climate Crisis. The Reading Room already given in the first para will last for 12 months (to 16/8/25) and has steadily updating content (as more issues are published in the magazines showcased). Indeed the front covers will be updated as new issues appear, furthermore the content of the magazines is fully searchable from the Reading Room. As any search will show, magazines really do have a lot of informative and helpful content and periodicals have the pleasing feature of updating themselves and putting up fresh stuff on a regular basis.