Buff

Seattle, WA

Local City Rankings Article

Turning a New Page

Shakespeare gave us Hamlet. Tolstoy gave us War and Peace. Joyce gave us Ulysses. Those were their gifts. But today, book lovers also bear the albatross of their literary art: millions of dead trees. In fact, some 4 billion trees are cut down each year for paper—and about 30 million of them are used for books bought in the U.S. alone. This fact didn’t sit right with friends Raz Godelnik, Eylon Israely, Oren Entin, and Gilad Ness-Berlin, four literature buffs who last year founded Eco Libris, a Seattle- and Delaware-based organization that works to balance out trees lost to book-making by planting new ones in developing countries, from Malawi to Guatemala.