Maybe I'm biased, because I seem to have a soft spot for Turkey, or at least for its Nobel laureates. So this story on Treehugger both attracted my attention and raised a little bit of pique.
It turns out that the Turkish government has provided free textbooks for schoolchildren. (Yay, obviously.) Except that they give them away, at a cost of $800 million and lots and lots of trees, and then they mostly get thrown out at the end of the year. And so they produce all new ones and the cycle continues.
"So [and here comes the snark] they’ve come up with an ingenious remedy that some folks have been practicing for centuries, book lending." Students will now return the books at the end of the school year, which is what I did through my years of public education. Not only is this good environmentally and economically, but it can offer Turkish children the opportunity to engage in such fun activities as seeing who had your textbook in years past, and writing in fake "funny" names to entertain future generations of textbook users.
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