Going Green: Implementing Sustainable Strategies in Libraries Around the World

Buildings, Management, Programmes and Services

Petra Hauke, Madeleine Charney, Harri Sahavirta

• Publisher: De Gruyter Saur
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110605990
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Bibliothèques et sciences de l'information

This publication examines aspects of reducing the ecological footprint in libraries' workaday operations as well as the social role and responsibility of libraries as leaders in environmental sustainability. The theoretical background and practical applications of contributions made by worldwide libraries to the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) are discussed.

General articles and research studies from Finland, Germany, Portugal, and Brazil illuminate libraries' contributions to the SDGs. Case studies from Sweden, Kenya, Germany, Ukraine, China, and Serbia highlight challenges and opportunities in implementing sustainable approaches in public libraries. Examples of best practice from academic libraries in Hong Kong, Cameroon, Germany, Uganda, USA and Kenya, are presented.

All papers published in this book are selected from the best papers of the ENSULIB Satellite Meeting 2017 in Berlin, the ENSULIB/Public Libraries Section's Open Session at the IFLA Conference 2017 in Poland, and from the IFLA Green Library Award 2017. All articles are written in English.

Part 1:General

Harri Sahavirta

1A Garden on the Roof Doesn’t Make a Library Green

A Case for Green Libraries

Abstract: Catalysed by the urgency of climate change, this chapter provides a multifaceted definition of sustainability as applied to libraries. Drawing from a range of international projects, the reader sees how dedication to sustainability action has become more central and widespread in the library profession worldwide. Successful examples are drawn from IFLA’s Green Library Award as well as other innovative programmes, services, buildings and projects based on increasing consciousness around environmental responsibility. Cultural factors are sensitively taken into consideration when defining success, recognising the variability of different countries’ access to resources.

Keywords: Green libraries; Sustainability; Climatic changes; Community development

Introduction

Sustainability as an aim, driven by anxiety about climate change, has truly become a global phenomenon. Consequently, environmental awareness and sustainability have entered the centre of discussion in the library world. Let us think, for example, of the immediate success of the IFLA Green Library Award: 30 libraries from five continents submitted their green library project for the first annual award in 2016. The number of submissions has not decreased since then (Leyrer, in this volume) and one may well claim that libraries all over the world are therefore increasingly committed to environmental sustainability.

Despite this, no one has comprehensively defined what environmental awareness means for libraries. One might also ask whether a single definition would be possible when considering the varying conditions for the operation of libraries in different parts of the world. Cultural and social factors – even the climate and level of education – vary greatly from Uganda to Ukraine as well as Brazil to China and Finland. However, libraries everywhere should be allowed to call themselves green libraries if they undertake environmental work which has been successful.

Moreover, there are also general characteristics for sustainable libraries. The purpose of this article is to create an overview of these specific and common features as well as perceive the essence of sustainability. The starting point may be Finnish public libraries and the environmental work undertaken in the Helsinki City Library, while examples are taken worldwide and introduce the green projects represented in this volume.

Growing Environmental Awareness

The libraries’ environmental friendliness or sustainability forms a sort of temporal cycle. If, for example, we think of Finnish libraries 50 years ago, environmental friendliness and sustainability were dictated by circumstances. In the 1960s and 1970s, those living in previous wartimes remembered the scarcity of such periods, when the standard of living was not at all at the current level, with Finland and many other European countries relatively poor. The heating costs of housing and public buildings were minimised, everything possible was recycled, goods were not bought in vain and certainly not thrown out before their expiry date. The consuming culture of later generations – at home and work – was quite different. At the same time, the world was woken up in the oil crisis to find that natural resources are not unlimited and human beings are destroying their environment by polluting or, in the worst case, launching a nuclear war. For many libraries around the world, scarce conditions are still a matter of fact.

Since the 1970s, the trend has been twofold in Finland and elsewhere in Europe. Consumption habits have changed completely along with prosperity. Individuals buy more products, which are often packaged with needless amounts of cardboard and plastic. In everyday life a completely new category of essential commodities – computers, mobile devices and other technologies – has appeared, which consume electricity and have an unnecessarily short life cycle. Today considerably more waste is produced, with increasing amounts coming from information technology devices.

On the other hand, environmental awareness has grown. Scientists have studied the influence of human beings on their environment and the impact of pollution on humans. According to scientific studies, current carbon dioxide emissions are causing climate warming, which has a huge impact on living conditions (although the exact impacts of warming cannot be identified). Pollution is dangerous to health and plastic waste a threat to not only the oceans but also human beings. The increase in environmental awareness has led to a change of thinking and action at the individual level, as illustrated by a project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries called “Talking Truth: Finding Your Voice Around the Climate Change Crisis” (Charney and Colvin, in this volume). At national and international level, almost all countries are committed to the Paris Agreement (United Nations 2015) and the United Nations has recently released the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), 17 goals to transform our world, to which, among others, the IFLA in the library sector is committed. The United Nation’s goals also offer a platform for national sustainability programmes which libraries in Portugal are attempting to implement (Pinto and Ochôa, in this volume).

Scientific knowledge and understanding of environmental issues has increased. However, this information only reaches some people while others simply remain ignorant of environmental issues, which has always been the case in terms of scientific results. However, the new phenomenon in the Western world is a selective denial of scientific knowledge. While our lifestyles and achievements are largely based on the exploitation and application of scientific results, an ever-louder group of people selectively denies such information. The denial can be based either on religious beliefs, in which case divine revelation is believed to overturn scientific knowledge, or philosophical relativism, in which case it is held that there are no absolute truths and all views are equally good. In its simplest form, this argument points out that “there are other opinions”, seen recently when the United States broke away from international environmental work and in June 2017 announced it would cease all participation in the Paris Agreement. Scientific knowledge, however, is not a matter of opinion but based on well-founded, intersubjectively tested and peer reviewed research. If we present an alternative view to science, it must be at least as well founded and justified.

Consequently, there is plenty of well grounded environmental information, but it does not reach everyone. Some people remain ignorant, partly due to denying the validity of knowledge while others are simply negligent or thoughtless. It would therefore be natural to define the dissemination of environmental awareness and information as the task of green libraries. One might think that the library is an entity where reliable, relevant and up to date environmental information is easily found. The library could also be expected to promote environmental awareness and sustainability in their community. Librarians are professionals in information management, trusted as such, so are expected to not disseminate misinformation or “alternative facts”.

Sustainable Library – Green Library

However, the definition of the green library has not been built around reliable environmental information. Nor has it been said at the practical level that libraries themselves would have internalised environmental awareness – libraries, while well placed to respond, are sometimes unintentionally negligent or thoughtless, but involuntarily so. This is why it is advisable to refine the definitions of green and sustainable libraries, but at the same time create a critical eye for sustainable activities and environmental awareness of libraries.

Sustainability is usually defined so that it includes economy, environment and equality. Sustainable development should therefore take account of economic considerations (saving resources), but the development should also be environmentally conscious. In addition, development should include a social aspect: it is not sustainable if it increases human inequality. The sustainable library’s definition can be built on these basic pillars, with the author’s preferred wording as follows:

Sustainability = Responsibility + Responsiveness + Respectfulness

Thus, the sustainable library takes seriously and responds to the various economic, environmental and social challenges our societies confront. Sustainable libraries should act responsively and promote responsibility in their community in every possible way, not just by sharing reliable information.

The green library has been considered as a narrower concept which focuses on the environmental impacts of libraries. This author’s argument is that the green library should be defined more extensively to include environmental awareness (dissemination of environmental information), the environmental friendliness of the library in its building and own activities as well as wider community support (sustainability) (Sahavirta 2017).

Such a broad definition has not been the starting point for a green library debate. Environmentally sustainable, the green library is often defined as an energy efficient building. ODLIS does not use the term green library, providing a “see” reference to sustainable library which is defined as:

sustainable library:
A library designed to minimize negative impact on the natural environment and maximize indoor environmental quality by means of careful site selection, use of natural construction materials and biodegradable products, conservation of resources (water, energy, paper), and responsible waste disposal (recycling, etc.). (Sustainable library n.d.)

Such a definition is, in a sense, very easy since the criteria of environmental-efficient buildings are simply applied to the libraries. It is evident that these criteria cannot be ignored. The environmentally friendly library should take into account general heating as well as air-conditioning recommendations and save electricity, for example, in its lighting solutions. A marvellous example of such an ecological library building is Sun Yat-sen Library of Guangdong Province (China) where rain water is collected, solar power used to generate electricity and there is fresh air instead conditioned air. The greenness of the building is strengthened by a roof garden and lawns in front of the library (Huang and Chen, in this volume).

However, the weakness of this definition is that it applies in the same way to all buildings and therefore cannot be a defining feature of the green library, since it does not differentiate libraries from other buildings. Not all green buildings are green libraries and a garden on the roof does not make a library. Highlighting the criteria of the green building also means that most libraries operating in old buildings will almost automatically fall outside the definition. It is therefore worth considering whether we want such stringent criteria for the green library that few libraries are capable of fulfilling. This is taken into account in the Chinese example while the project also delivers educational projects in sustainability.

Nevertheless, the environmental friendliness of the library building also includes how the feature characteristics of the library are designed considering environmental aspects. In this way an added criterion can be that the public library building is centrally located and hence easily reachable by foot, public transport or bike. On the other hand, it can be presumed that the lighting and temperature of book warehouses – where no one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• About IFLA
• Preface
• Part 1: General
• Part 2: Public Libraries
• Part 3: Academic Libraries
• Appendix