Taking responsibility

24.07.2019 - Carsten Schlumm, Head of Media Services / Production at NWB Verlag, takes a critical view of the current use of resources. For him, it is clear that there is an alarming imbalance between the availability and consumption of resources. He calls for more responsibility to be taken. In all areas. Also in our daily actions. NWB Verlag has been setting a good example for years. In this interview, Carsten Schlumm gives an insight into the steps that have led to this and which goals are still on the agenda.

Mr Schlumm, what internal measures have you introduced at NWB Verlag to conserve resources?

NWB does not see sustainability as a fair-weather issue, but as an integral part of forward-looking corporate management. This is why NWB commissioned a multi-disciplinary and cross-departmental sustainability team back in 2014 to focus on the ongoing strategic orientation towards greater sustainability. With the help of the "N-Kompass" sustainability tool, the team worked on analysing and creating a sustainability strategy. To this end, all publishing areas and sustainability-related topics were analysed and evaluated in depth in order to then prioritise key topics.

Developing a strategy is one thing. Transferring it to the entire workforce is another. How do you manage this task at NWB Verlag?

As we want to get all employees on board when it comes to sustainability, the entire NWB workforce is regularly informed about current and planned sustainability activities. We have published a sustainability report every year since 2013. To give a concrete example of a measure: As NWB Verlag, we only purchase electricity that is generated 100% from hydropower. There is a solar system on the roof of our office building that generates a small amount of our "own" sustainable electricity 365 days a year.

Let's stay with the use of resources: paper is an extremely important resource in a publishing house. How does NWB Verlag deal with this?

We endeavour to plan our print runs as precisely as possible in order to minimise the use of resources at all points in the production chain. The future of our print productions lies in print-on-demand processes, where we only produce titles when they are ordered by our customers. We already tested this in 2014 with a pilot product, our NWB-Rapid. Last year, we used the experience we gained from this to convert the production of our seven basic works to genuine print-on-demand. The volumes of the individual works range from 2,000 to just under 13,000 pages, which are produced and dispatched precisely to our customers.

Are there any further plans for the future in this regard?

The next step will be to focus on our book productions. There is also the possibility of saving considerable resources here. However, we will have to adapt our internal processes beforehand. To reduce internal paper consumption, we switched all of our in-house printing systems to duplex printing back in 2016, thereby reducing our internal consumption by 33%.