This month we’ll publish our Sustainability Guide digitally (and not in print) for the first time. Our readers will now be able to feast on their annual diet of ‘green’ issues while being environmentally friendly at the same time.

LAST year when we held our biggest readership survey to date the overwhelming response from readers was that they wanted to see more about sustainability. This led to CFJ launching its ‘Commitment to Sustainability’ pledge, which was accompanied by a dedicated section on sustainability in every edition.

The section focuses on anything to do with sustainability in the industry, whether that’s opinion, news, new products and innovations, or advice from experts in the industry, and operates separate to the annual Sustainability Guide and the sustainability feature.

Incidentally, most readers expressed a desire for CFJ to remain in print rather than going digital, a sure sign many floorlayers and contractors still enjoy sitting down and reading the print copy, rather than scrolling through the online version.

But we’ve decided to take a different tack with the Sustainability Guide starting this year – we’re going fully digital. The guide will now be published as a digital magazine around the same time as the June edition of CFJ reaches readers.

There are many reasons for going digital, but one of the most important is to deliver a message: if we have a dedicated sustainability journal, then it’s preferable it’s released in the most environmentally friendly way possible.

Research shows going paperless reduces your impact on forests, decreases the amount of waste that is dumped into landfills, cuts energy use and helps lessen the impact of climate change. According to the environmental advocacy group The World Counts, global production of paper and cardboard amounted to 420,000,000 tons in 2021.

Going paperless also reportedly helps reduce C02 (carbon dioxide) emissions. Turning a single tree into 17 reams of paper results in about 110 lbs of C02 being released into the atmosphere. Additionally, trees are also ‘carbon sinks’ and every tree that is not cut down for paper usage is able to absorb C02 gasses.

Of course, for various reasons, CFJ itself will remain in both print and digital for the foreseeable future; the same readership survey which told us readers want to read more about sustainability also made abundantly clear an outright majority of our readers want their CFJ in print. That makes sense: many floorlayers read CFJ when they’re on lunch when a paper product is more convenient.  

We hope you enjoy the guide as it appears this year, and would welcome your feedback on how user-friendly you find it. We believe this is the only sensible way forward in a world which is more aware of the human impact on our climate than ever before. If we’re to save our planet, then it starts with baby steps from every single one of us.