Read, Re-use, Recycle

I’ve yet to see the book to find out what the writing says – I’m keeping my fingers crossed for smart, erudite yet helpful comments from someone who understood the book better than I’m going to – but I know it’s a fairly standard part of buying recycled books. I also know that the scribbles will actually say things like "Haha – his name is Cockburn", or my personal grammatically retentive favourite, "Stop using semi-colons I hate you", but I dare to hope.

So, considering that the book probably isn’t in the best condition in the world – unless, like me, you’re amused by margin-based commentary antics – why would you want to buy it second-hand?

Well, the UK publishing industry accounts for massive amounts of paper consumption – 194kg per person, to put a number on it – and it all has to come from somewhere. If the wood from each tree was used just to make books – which it isn’t - and each book weighed one pound – which they frequently don’t - then from one average tree, we could get 942 books. From where I’m sitting now in my bedroom, I can see eighteen – most of which weigh a lot more than a pound. Mainly because I’m a big geek and I have the world’s largest French dictionary taking over my shelf.

That’s nothing compared to the collection – mostly Harry Potter and The Babysitter’s Club – that I’ve been hoarding in my tiny bedroom over the years. I just can’t bring myself to get rid of The Jolly Christmas Postman, and I’m not apologising for it. Add to that my dad’s extensive collection of World War I history tomes and my mum’s inexplicable desire to learn enough from crime novels to become a secret detective, and we could probably find at least three or four hundred books in our two bedroom house.

The worst thing about it is that, once you’ve bought a book and read it once, then you’re fairly unlikely to read it again unless it’s really, really good. The Jolly Christmas Postman, for instance, obviously comes under that heading. Even then, you might read it three, maybe four times, at a push, and in the meantime, there are more people out there buying the same book and doing exactly the same thing.

That’s why buying a book second-hand is better for the environment: once you’ve finished with a book you know you’re never going to read again, you can pass it on to a charity shop, or sell it to Blackwell’s or an online bookstore – making no pointed comments about the closure of Your:Books, obviously – and someone else can take it after you. Second hand books are cheaper to buy, you can get money back from them when you pass it on, and they save trees: what’s not to love?

They might be a little well-loved – or hated, if the constructive "This is RUBBISH" margin comments are anything to go by – but in most cases, they’re still completely legible. There’s even a website called Green Metropolis where you can buy and sell second-hand books for a standard £3.75 with free delivery, and for every book, they donate 5p to the Woodland Trust. That way, you’re not only saving old trees, but planting new ones at the same time. Way to multitask, people.

Libraries are another solution. The University Library stakes a claim on its website to having "more than one million print books and 3,500 print articles". Yes, it’s a huge amount of paper – and probably backs up the urban legend that the library is sinking - but that obviously stops us all having to buy every book we need, just to read that one chapter we were probably meant to read a week ago. Thank goodness for libraries, because I have no desire to hang on to any book from the Economics module I did last year. Not unless I get to burn it and do ritual dances around it – which probably causes more environmental problems than it solves, really.

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