Design Books to be Disassembled, Recycled, or Reused
The blogger at Book Calendar left a great comment on a post on returns by Wiley’s Chris Webb:
There is a wonderful book called Cradle to Cradle, the book is designed to be recycled and reused. There is no reason this cannot be done with other books on a much larger scale. It is not printed on paper, it is printed on a thin sheet of plastic. The ink can be removed using a chemical bath of green chemicals.
I would imagine it would be possible to take the reusable concept and build it into a print on demand system, where the returned material could be recycled into the printing process with a few intervening steps.
Something like this could change the returns process completely.
Rethink book production: I thought that was a pretty powerful idea, but I wonder if you need new paper or ink — what about simply architecting a book differently? I wonder what new kind of binding a bunch of design students would come up with if they couldn’t use glue? I wonder if removable boards on hardcovers could be made to be economical? You would pay different prices for books depending on how long they last. Build in the obsolescence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradle_to_cradle
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