The Power of Buying Secondhand Books: A Guide to Environmental Benefits
The environmental benefits of buying secondhand books are often overlooked, but they are an important way to reduce your impact on the environment. Not only do you save on the energy used to produce and ship new books, but you also preserve the resources used to make them.
When you purchase a used book, you can be sure that the resources needed to produce it have already been used. This means that the energy and resources that would have gone into producing a new copy are saved. And, of course, you save money, too!
By buying secondhand books, you can also reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. According to the EPA, Americans threw away more than 2.4 million tons of books in 2008 alone. That’s a lot of trees, water, and energy that could have been saved if people had purchased used books instead.
Another benefit of buying secondhand books is that you can find rare and out-of-print books that you may not be able to find in a traditional bookstore. Bookstores can’t always keep up with the latest releases, so you may find some