Plant A Tree With Every Makeup Book Read With Eco-Libris

Note to readers: Makeup Minute is participating in Blog Action Day happening today, a one day event held annually with thousands of bloggers uniting for action. This year’s focus is on the environment.

If you or someone you know is an avid book reader of beauty and makeup books or even just books in general, Eco-Libris is a fabulous green company founded so you can have a tree planted for each book you read.

Raz Godelnik, co-founder of Eco-Libris, gave me the details:

About 20 Million trees are cut down annually for virgin paper used for the production of books sold in the U.S. alone. What we want to do is to raise awareness to the destructive environmental impacts of using paper for the production of books and provide people with an affordable and easy way to do something about it.

The process itself is fairly simple – upon entering our website, customers decide how many books they would like to balance out. They then pay for it online and a tree is planted for each of these books. Customers also receive a sticker made of recycled paper for every book they balance out saying “One Tree Planted for this Book” and can later display these stickers on their books’ sleeves.

We have partnered with three highly respected US and UK registered non-profit organizations that work in collaboration with local communities in developing countries to plant the trees. These trees are planted in high ecological and sustainable standards in Latin America and Africa, where deforestation is a crucial problem, and planting trees not only helps to fight climate change and conserve soil and water, but also benefits many local people, for whom these trees offer many benefits and an opportunity for a better future.

Eventually and hopefully sooner then later, books will be made from recycled paper or other eco-friendly materials and logging for paper will stop. On that day we’ll happily move on to a new cause, but until then we think every book reader should take action. We also don’t forget the responsibility of the book publishing industry to the current situation and we intend to become a strong voice in a call for change towards printing books in an eco-friendly manner.

So the next time you buy a makeup book like Kevyn Aucoin’s Face Forward or Carmindy’s 5-Minute Face, you can have a tree planted–almost like buying carbon credits. Pretty cool, eh?