It is high time for the authorities to promote the use of secondhand textbooks across the country, says an article in Beijing News. The following is an excerpt:

According to the Xinhua News Agency, officials with the Ministry of Education recently revealed that a system for distributing used textbooks will be implemented in primary and middle schools in some rural areas this spring. Shandong, Jiangxi and Jiangsu provinces have already carried out the scheme.

The central government will buy the books and then distribute them free of charge to students.

It is a heartening move with two major benefits.

First, it will alleviate the financial burden on government and households. Textbook costs account for 53 percent of all the fees primary school students must pay and about 65 percent of those facing middle school students.

Second, using secondhand books is environmentally friendly because of the resources such as trees and energy that are saved. According to industry figures, producing one ton of textbook paper requires 20 trees aged between 20 to 40 years, 100 tons of water, 1.2 tons of coal and other materials and churns out 300 tons of polluted water.

It is estimated that it takes 450,000 tons of textbook paper a year to publish the textbooks required for primary and middle school education in China, which amounts to 9 million trees. How many trees and how much energy could be saved if half of the textbooks for primary and middle school education could be kept in circulation for three to five years?

The idea of reusing textbooks has been around for many years, but little progress has been made. This is mainly the result of two obstacles.

Vested interest groups, such as textbook publishers and wholesalers, are at best reluctant and at worst completely against reusing textbooks. And some parents are concerned about potential hygiene issues involving reused textbooks, fearing that used books carry infectious diseases.

Such concerns may be addressed through strict and standardized disinfections and hygiene procedures before the used textbooks are distributed to next users.