As a leading higher education institution, sustainability is at the heart of everything we do. It’s not just a secondary consideration, it’s built into the very fabric of our objectives, culture and community. Guillermo and Michèle de la Dehesa is very conscious of this, and we try our best to give to users the best resources, databases and provide a length of digital books. One of ideas that came up to the Library is to give a second life and a reusable option to the books that can’t not be shelved: the Bookcrossing section. A shelf outside of the Libraries, in María de Molina Campus and Segovia Campus where any person from the IEU Community can take any of they choice or leave a book.

Some students from the TDHR program, has chosen IEU Library Bookcrossing as their model of sustainability good practices, their idea is to give more visibility to this project by changing its location, so IEU Community could be more interested on it. The Library team has listened to their idea, exchanged some information and shared concerns.

The new Bookcrossing’s location could be the result of a great example of paperless, reusable and recycling. The books will have a second chance to be read, took from other people or changed for other books.

The results of their project, called Leading change: foresting a reading culture and sustainability, has shown that more of the students are interested into giving visibility to the Bookcrossing and the acquisition of more fiction books. Thanks to their research, students are more concerned about reusing second-hand books: 32 million trees are deforested in paper industry and 320 million books are wasted. If we could only recycle the 30%, 4.9 million trees would be saved. Amazing, isn’t it?

Thanks to TDHR Group 5 for thinking in the Library and it’s sustainable commitment to improve our services and give the best options to the IEU Community.