Cover Story: Balancing Act

Some newspapers are methodically going greener, reducing energy consumption and saving money

By LaShell Stratton | Illustration by Brian Stauffer

First Published: March 2008

When News Corp. in New York City acquired Dow Jones & Co. in 2007, it immediately issued a historic directive: Dow Jones would join the new parent company in its goal to become carbon neutral by 2010.

Drastically reducing greenhouse gas emissions in two years would require an ambitious plan. Dow Jones might have to adopt many practices News Corp. implemented on launching its Green Energy Initiative in May 2007, says Rachel Webber, director of energy initiatives at News Corp. That could mean purchasing more energy-efficient equipment with Energy Star ratings or using renewable energy sources such as solar, wind or geothermal.

Before Dow Jones can implement changes, it must calculate its carbon footprint: its total tonnage of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, says Paul Jakubski, director of environmental and safety at Dow Jones. “After you’ve come up with the baseline, then you can find ways to reduce your energy consumption,” says Jakubski, who is charged with calculating the carbon footprint for all of Dow Jones’ operations, including its 17 production plants.

Many newspapers that have decided to follow “the green path” are beginning with the basics by calculating their carbon footprints or conducting energy audits that determine how much electricity, water and heat their operations consume. But determining how to do those calculations can be a challenge. No universally accepted method of calculating total GHG emissions exists, says Kathy Mason, NAA’s vice president of government affairs, and several standards used to calculate a carbon footprint can yield different results.

Newspapers also face challenges factoring into their total carbon footprint the GHGs emitted by suppliers in the course of making newsprint, ink and other consumables. Though newspapers may choose not to include these calculations, some have done so, reasoning that newsprint, ink and other materials are all part of the operation’s overall consumption.

Getting those numbers from suppliers “has been a battle,” says Frank Anthony, vice president of operations for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. Anthony, who began calculating his newspaper’s carbon footprint almost eight months ago, says some suppliers have been less than forthcoming about their GHG emissions or do not have the information readily available.

The obstacles can be daunting, but news organizations such as News Corp., the Times Free Press, The Washington Post Co. and Cox Enterprises Inc. in Atlanta are forging ahead with green initiatives and have good reason to do so. Often, there is an economic payoff in the end. “Because when you drive efficiency, you cut costs,” Webber says.

Calculating the Numbers
To estimate its global carbon footprint, Dow Jones is using the Greenhouse Gas Protocol corporate standard established by World Resources Institute (www.wri.org) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (www.wbcsd.org). Jakubski says he chose the GHG Protocol because it “is the most recognized standard internationally, and most if not all major corporations are using it.”

Last year, Jakubski began to calculate the three GHG emissions that Dow Jones produces: carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. To do so, Jakubski is looking at three key components: Dow Jones’ direct emissions (including emergency generators and company-owned vehicles such as propane forklifts), indirect emissions (from suppliers of newsprint, ink and other equipment, or business air travel) and overall electricity use such as from lighting and presses.

News Corp. will recommend ways Dow Jones can lower GHG emissions, Webber says. Many of those recommendations will probably be the best practices that have already helped News Corp. steadily reduce its 641,150 tons of GHG emissions, she adds.

One option for Dow Jones is using renewable energy whenever logistically and economically feasible, Webber says. Several News Corp. operations currently do so.

For instance, Jamba, News Corp.’s mobile phone entertainment firm in Berlin, uses renewable energy certified by the Tüv Nord Group, a technical service provider in Germany. News International Ltd. went carbon neutral this year, Webber says, by using 70 percent hydroelectric power and 30 percent combined heat and power sources.

To reduce methane emissions, News Corp.’s News America Marketing began replacing its existing field fleet with hybrid vehicles last year. The project will involve 209 car replacements and is projected to yield $369,000 in savings over the lifetime of the vehicles. However, Jakubski says, Dow Jones has no projection of how much money it would save by implementing some of these changes.

Finding Other Solutions
Like Jakubski, Bob McLane, director of safety programs at The Washington Post, is using the GHG Protocol to calculate the newspaper’s carbon footprint. He has been doing so since spring 2007 but has encountered obstacles.

Rather than starting with the GHG Protocol, he used a different standard, which he declined to name, but things didn’t compute. “I knew something was wrong when I started to compare my calculations with other newspapers’,” McLane says, and realized that the total carbon footprint was different by several zeroes.

When McLane switched to the GHG Protocol, the calculations started to make more sense, but he encountered another problem in soliciting information from Post suppliers about their carbon footprints.

“Some are working on it,” he says. “Others are caught like a deer in the headlights, so to speak, when you ask them for the numbers.” McLane was challenged yet again when he called the three energy companies that power the newspaper’s three buildings—the Springfield, Va., and College Park, Md., production plants and the headquarters in Washington, D.C.—to determine the Post’s energy consumption. Getting all that information “wasn’t easy,” he says.

McLane hopes to complete the carbon footprint calculation this year but says the Post hasn’t decided what to do with the information. “We’re just trying to understand it first,” McLane says. “I know that News Corp. has decided to go carbon neutral by 2010, but we’re not ready to make a commitment like that right now,” he says. “We don’t know what the full implications would be.”

That doesn’t mean that the Post is not finding other ways to analyze and reduce energy consumption, McLane says. Informal, internal energy audits have helped to reduce consumption at the Springfield plant, saving at least $100,000 annually, says Eric Brinkman, the plant’s facilities manager.

As part of a companywide cost-reduction effort that began almost two years ago, Brinkman decided to calculate regularly the facilities’ energy use. He focuses on the three major energy expenditures: lighting, air compressors and the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system (HVAC). With the help of the local utility company, Brinkman records half-hour readings when lights in the facilities or the HVAC system are turned on and then off. He usually conducts the tests on Sunday afternoons when presses are idle and few people are in the buildings. Brinkman then calculates the difference to determine each system’s energy consumption.

Brinkman was able to pinpoint energy-wasting areas. Automatic valves on the HVAC that weren’t working properly were replaced, and building air leaks were fixed. “We’re still trying to automate our building operations system,” Brinkman says, which could mean installing programmable thermostats. “We also want to take more advantage of natural cooling.”

A Companywide Effort
In 2005, Cox Enterprises announced plans to reduce Cox’s companywide carbon footprint by 20 percent by 2017. To calculate its footprint, which turned out to be 832,000 tons of GHG, Cox considered the cost of the company’s electricity, natural gas, fuels (fleet, airplane, etc.) and pollution from the company’s processes, says Elizabeth Halter, project manager for public affairs and corporate communications at Cox Enterprises. The company then used the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s recommended measurements to finish the calculation, which is based on the popular GHG Protocol.

Since the announcement, Cox has instituted several energy-saving measures, some of which have saved money. Cox has switched to low-flow toilets to save water, which is especially important in drought-prone Atlanta, says Stan Richmond, vice president of operations for Cox Newspapers Inc. Cox also reduced electricity use by switching from T12 to T8 fluorescent lighting, which requires less operating energy and offers greater light output, and to automatic light switches.

Cox’s Valpak production facility for direct-mail operations in Elm City, N.C., will use 6 percent less electricity by installing alternating current instead of direct or continuous current press drives when it opens in early 2008.

Cox’s biggest savings were realized by spending $6.7 million on energy-efficient upgrades at SP Newsprint Co., which is owned by Cox Enterprises, The McClatchy Co. in Sacramento and Media General Inc. in Richmond, Va. (The three companies recently announced plans to sell SP Newsprint to the White Birch Paper Co. in Greenwich, Conn. See story, p. 18.)

Upgrades to SP Newsprint’s Clackamas, Ore., paper recycling plant and the Newberg, Ore., newsprint plant will save $2.8 million annually, Halter says. The company also expanded efforts to use recycled paper instead of wood chips as a raw ingredient for the newsprint and uses an energy-efficient de-inking process that turns recycled paper into pulp. These changes helped SP Newsprint earn a $1 million incentive check from the Energy Trust of Oregon Inc. (www.energytrust.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting energy efficiency and renewable energies in Oregon.

Preemptive Measures
At the Chattanooga Times Free Press, Anthony does not know how much money the newspaper would save if it institutes greener measures after calculating its carbon footprint. But he does know that since 1999, the newspaper has tried to conserve energy, helping to save an average of $75,000 annually, he says. Some changes were as simple as switching to low wattage lights or converting to an electronic ballast system, he says.

The newspaper saved an additional $8,000 to $10,000 a year by implementing more changes after a free audit in 2004 by students and professors at Georgia Institute of Technology (www.gatech.edu). Georgia Tech has one of 26 Industrial Assessment Centers funded at 31 universities nationwide by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program (www.eere.energy.gov).

When the Times Free Press did its audit, Georgia Tech was the closest IAC. Since then, Tennessee Technological University (www.tntech.edu) has opened an IAC.
IAC teams assess ways that businesses can save energy, reduce waste and improve productivity. The audit is offered free to businesses with gross annual sales of less than $100 million, fewer than 500 employees on site and annual utility bills of more than $100,000 but less than $2 million.

Bill Meffert, manager of Georgia Tech’s Energy and Environmental Management Center, was part of the team that conducted the audit of the Times Free Press. An average audit takes just one day, he says, and teams usually comprise two faculty members and two or three engineering students from different disciplines.

Before the audit, companies submit a year’s worth of utility bills. On the day of the audit, the team does “an enterprisewide system analysis of how much energy is used,” Meffert says. “We analyze their gas, water and electricity.” The team usually looks at the same systems regardless of the industry: steam, compressed air, furnace ovens and HVAC. But at newspapers, presses and packaging and distribution equipment also are examined. 

Teams have conducted 123 audits for the newspaper industry and made 901 recommendations. For proprietary reasons, Meffert could not name other audited newspapers, but the IAC database shows that the most popular recommendations are installing occupancy sensors in rooms to determine whether lights or heating should be on or off, and using more energy-efficient lamps or ballasts. Newspapers can find the closest IAC by going to http://iac.rutgers.edu/database/centers.php and entering a city and state or ZIP code.

Sixty days after the IAC audit of the Times Free Press, Anthony received a report with a cost/benefit analysis of recommended changes. “They told me the cost of the labor, the total cost if we made the switch and the energy savings that would come from making the change,” Anthony says. Of the 10 recommended changes, the Times Free Press instituted nine, he says.

One recommendation involved putting motion sensors in all rooms so lights automatically turn off when rooms are vacant. “It cost us $50 each to install, and we were able to make the money back in less than eight months,” he says. Not all changes have been quite as inexpensive, so Anthony has introduced them gradually.

“You should try to slip a few things under the radar month after month,” he suggests. “Any publisher is not going to support spending $20,000 just to save $10,000.” Slow changes with positive results are more likely to win support of upper management, he says.

Newspapers may have to heed such advice sooner rather than later. In the next 10 years, Anthony says all businesses may be forced to be more eco-friendly and to report their carbon footprint to the federal government.  “Eventually, we may be required by the government to know this number,” he says.

Legislative action tends to support his prediction. Last year, Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John W. Warner (R-Va.) introduced S.2191, America’s Climate Security Act of 2007, which “would mandate that all industries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and also will likely result in higher energy costs for businesses, including newspapers,” says NAA’s Mason. The Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee approved the bill, and Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) wants the Senate to vote on it in the next few months, Mason says.

“In the House, legislation is expected to be introduced shortly that would take a similar approach,” Mason adds. “There will continue to be a huge focus on this issue, but with 2008 being an election year, I’m not sure the issue will be resolved any time soon.” 

This election year could be the turning point for businesses, Anthony says, because “it all depends on who’s elected president.” Until then, he will continue to try saving energy and money and attempt to calculate the Times Free Press’ carbon footprint. “When the government tells us we have to do the calculation, then we don’t have to rush,” he says. “When you’re three-quarters of the way there, it’s not that big of a deal.”