'The Gazette' in Montreal Examines Its Carbon Footprint

By: Meg Campbell In a nation that long ago adopted green thinking, Quebec has always been something of an exception, says Catherine Wallace, assistant managing editor of The Gazette in Montreal.

Wallace realized that her paper covered ecological matters, but had not stopped to consider how green the paper was itself.

So the paper hired Zerofootprint, a Toronto nonprofit company, to calculate its carbon footprint. The result, a ?report card? compiled and written by reporter Marian Scott, was a groundbreaking exercise in Canadian journalistic and environmental transparency.

?We checked the heating bills for our plant and office and counted everything from newsprint (15,000 metric tons this year) to the 61,500 Styrofoam cups used in our coffee machines,? Scott reported.

Scott noted that just 20% of the Gazette?s newsprint is recycled content. Still, it was better office and newsroom copier paper, which had no recycled content.

Commuting and driving to reporting and sales assignments contributed 110 tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the report card said, while the newsroom and business office emitted 347.7 tons of greenhouse gas annually.

In the wake of the startling, and embarrassing, results, the Gazette made changes. The first was to buy copiers that would print on both sides. The next was to get rid of the foam cups. ?We gave everyone mugs,? Wallace says.

Some of the biggest changes occurred at the production plant. Workers built a duct to steer heat from inserting machines into the loading dock, and installed water meters to measure and regulate usage.

But the Bigfoot of the Gazette?s carbon footprint remains newsprint consumption and driving done by reporters, carriers, and sales reps, Wallace says: ?We haven?t really done anything about those because they are so complex.?