What's with the name?

I picked Dead Tree Digest because it's easy to say, hard to forget and tells you exactly what you're getting. But it also hints at the environmental mission behind the site.

A "Dead tree edition" is the old newsroom nickname for the printed paper, the version made of, well, a tree that used to be standing. We're building a printed thing on purpose here, so leaning into the phrase felt honest and a little bit funny.

However, the flipside to the name is that it reminded me that we're using real natural resources to produce this thing we can hold in our hand. From the start I wanted to make sure this was not only an interesting project and one that gets more people reading, but one that's also environmentally responsible.

That led to two key decisions.

The paper

Every issue is printed on recycled or FSC-certified stock. Recycled means the fiber has already lived a life; FSC-certified means the forest it came from is managed so it keeps being a forest. It's the same choice the good magazines make, and it's where every issue you print starts.

The trees

For every issue that lands in your mailbox, we plant a tree in your name through TIST Kenya, verified and routed so there's a receipt behind it. An issue uses about fifty sheets of the paper we print on, and a single grown tree yields around sixteen thousand that size, so the paper a particular issue uses is paid back to the earth 300 times over.

If you want to check my math, it's all on the trees page, running totals and receipts included, and your own tree tally is printed on the back cover of every issue you get in the mail.