Green Initiatives

Coin-Operated Press believes the Climate Crisis to be the most important problem for humanity to tackle in our lifetime. The main cause of rising global temperatures is greenhouse gases, mainly created by human activities, which get trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere and lock in the heat from the sun. Currently, the global average temperature sits around 1.1°C above pre-industrial levels. If this temperature increase reaches 2°C, it is estimated that there will be an even higher risk of dangerous and catastrophic natural events across the planet – flooding, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, and more. With this scale of extreme weather, the scientific evidence is clear, and few people can deny that we are facing a climate emergency. It is estimated that globally, over 50 billion tons of greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere each year. If we want to address the climate emergency we need to drastically reduce these emissions and aim for net zero.

The Scottish Government aims to reduce carbon emissions by 75% by 2030 and achieve net zero by 2045. Coin-Operated Press is committed to reducing our carbon emissions with every business decision we make.

Our Current Green Initiatives

We use public transport (ScotRail and Ember) to travel to all of our events and workshops.
We provide recycled paper and waste collage materials to our participants to make their mini-zines in our workshops. We also accept donations of unwanted art supplies and magazines to prevent them from going to landfill and give them a second life as a zine!
When we buy new workshop materials we opt for sustainable options (e.g. recycled paper, solvent-free glue sticks, etc.)
Our communications are primarily digital or face-to-face, and we send all of our contracts, invoices, information, etc. via email rather than via printed copies.
We have reusable ID cards rather than constantly printing business cards.
The vast majority of our advertising is digital.
We print our mini-zines and any physical advertising materials from a local Edinburgh company.
Our monthly zines are printed on recycled paper, and we use a UK-based printing company.
We package our orders in biodegradable packaging.
We choose to work with companies that also value green targets - for example: Kafe Kweer provides a variety of vegan and sustainable grocery products, Paradise Palms has a fully vegetarian & vegan menu, and The Salisbury Centre has a seed library that aims to create a (bio)diverse community hub for sharing skills, information, and resources about seeds, as well as seeds themselves.
We use Ecosia as our main search engine when working.

Our passion for environmentalism is woven through every cog in Coin-Operated Press. Even with our commitment to tackling the Climate Crisis through implementing our current green initiatives, our carbon footprint is approximately estimated at 5.9 tonnes of CO2 per year. In our efforts to reduce our emissions to net zero, we are working to actualize our aspirational green initiatives...

Future Green Initiatives

We aim to further educate our audience on the Climate Crisis and provide information within the zine world that can help our community.
To prevent our products from ending up in landfill, we aim to encourage our customers to share our zines or gift them to others, donate them to libraries, or upcycle them into their own zines.
We would like to enroll on the Green Champion CPD Course with Business Energy Scotland to gain training to help Coin-Operated Press become even more sustainable.
We would like to learn more about making paper to be able to provide recycled paper-making workshops alongside our programme of zine-making workshops.
We aim to set aside a portion of our funds to offset our carbon with Forestry and Land Scotland on a yearly basis.

If you have any tips or ideas to help us become even more environmentally friendly or if you would like to collaborate with us on climate-themed zine shenanigans, please email us at coinoperatedpress@gmail.com