Healthy Planet opens Books For Free shops

The Bookseller - 27.06.11 | Lisa Campbell

A green charity offering books for free aims to open an outlet in every town in the UK, and has called on publishers to donate titles.
The Booksellers Association has come out in support of the programme run by Healthy Planet, which promotes environmentally-friendly initiatives including funding conservation projects, providing learning resources for schools and more recently opening up Books For Free (BFF) shops.

The BFF shops are stocked with books that would otherwise be pulped or put in landfill by charity shops and second-hand book dealers that can’t sell them. Healthy Planet claims to have saved 50 tonnes of books from landfill this year, at 2,000 books a tonne.
There are currently nine BFF outlets open; in Basildon, Southport, Reading, Stockton-on-Tees and London—which has five outlets. A further 19 are in the pipeline. The charity takes advantage of empty retail spaces by offering to pay the lease-holder or landlord’s business rate in return for opening up a BFF store.
One of the latest outlets to open is in the West 12 shopping centre in Shepherd’s Bush, London, which asks customers to take no more than three books, each in return for an optional donation. It stocks a range of genres of books in varying conditions by authors including Stephen King, Frank Skinner and Agatha Christie.
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