In a release this week, GBA reps said the launch represents “a significant step forward in the publishing industry’s growing commitment to environmental responsibility and climate action.”

By Andrew Richard Albanese, Editor-in-Chief

The Green Book Alliance (GBA), the collaborative initiative dedicated to advancing sustainability within the book publishing industry, has announced the launch of its GBA Book Carbon Calculator, a free tool designed to help publishers and book industry organizations measure and better understand the carbon emissions of their books.

In a release, GBA reps said the calculator is especially useful for those “beginning their journey into carbon calculation,” offering “a practical and accessible” way for publishing professionals to calculate their emissions data and to potentially identify opportunities for more sustainable practices.

Specifically, the calculator allows users to:

• Estimate the carbon footprint of an individual book.
• Make more informed, lower-impact production decisions.
• Estimate emissions across key operational areas.
• Establish organizational baselines.
• Track sustainability progress over time.
• Engage in internal sustainability planning and reporting.

“Over the past several years, the book industry has made good progress reporting on its carbon impact. Those reports tend to look backward, after decisions have been made. The carbon calculator gives publishers and their trading partners an opportunity to look at carbon impact before a sourcing decision is made,” said Brian O’Leary, Executive director of BISG and GBA co-founder said, in a statement. “It is built to foster conversations among publishers, printers, and paper suppliers to better understand how planning and production decisions affect carbon emissions. Because it is freely available, we hope it can make sustainability a regular part of a sourcing conversation.”

Toward a More Sustainable Future

The Green Book Alliance was launched in September 2020, to focus on “internationally appropriate elements of greening the global supply chain.” The alliance is jointly led by the Book Industry Communication (BIC), Book Industry Study Group (BISG) and BookNet Canada (BNC) but welcomes and encourages support from other international publishing organizations.

The GBA Book Carbon Calculator traces its roots to the workshop on sustainability data collection at the 2025 Frankfurt Book Fair, where industry stakeholders expressed a need for better reporting and evaluation tools.

In response, the GBA worked with New Society Publishers and ECW Press, who had developed two “complementary” tools: the Book Carbon Footprint Calculator, which estimates “the cradle-to-warehouse greenhouse gas emissions associated with a printed book,” and the Publisher’s Carbon Footprint Calculator, a “carbon accounting tool that helps publishing companies measure and understand their overall greenhouse gas emissions.”

Now, with the new GBA Book Carbon Calculator, the Green Book Alliance has collaboratively adapted those efforts into a web tool for “publishers, printers, and supply chain partners across international markets” that can help enable “more climate-conscious choices in real time, or after a print run is finished to record carbon impacts for reporting purposes, carbon offsets.”

Sponsors and supporting organizations include: Gibbs Smith, Publishing Scotland, Friesens, ECW Press, and New Society Publishers.

In its release this week, GBA reps said the launch represents “a significant step forward in the publishing industry’s growing commitment to environmental responsibility and climate action” by making emissions tracking “more approachable and industry-specific.” Reps stressed that beyond measuring emissions, the calculator also “encourages conversations” among all stakeholders in the publishing industry supply chain, calling sustainability is an “ongoing process.”

To mark the launch of the calculator, the Green Book Alliance will host a live launch and demo webinar at 11 a.m. ET on June 30, 2026, where attendees will learn how the calculator works and can ask questions of the project team. The webinar is free and open to all. Interested parties can register here.

The GBA is also planning a working group to help guide development of future versions of the tool.