Most of your textbooks are single-use. After graduating, old textbooks are thrown away, which is a big waste of money and paper.
Many countries already reuse their textbooks. In the US, book companies will come to schools and buy used books. They then resell them to new students the following year at a lower price. A high school textbook in the US can have up to eight owners before it is no longer in a good enough condition to be used, according to Xinhua. The book can then be recycled.
In China, according to the National Press and Publication Administration, students across the country buy 2.8 billion new textbooks every year. If the students of the following year could reuse these textbooks, it would save over 20 billion yuan each year. That's enough money to build 40,000 primary schools, China Daily noted.
Primary and junior high school students in several Chinese cities are reusing music, arts, science and IT textbooks. That's because students don't have to take down many notes in their textbooks for these subjects, which makes them suitable for reusing.
However, these books only account for a tiny part of the total number of textbooks. As there is no good way for redistributing(再分配) second-hand textbooks, most textbooks still end up as waste, the Paper reported.
Changes in curricula (课程) also make it hard to reuse textbooks. "I'm among the first group of students to take classes after the recent curricular reform (改革), so I have to buy new textbooks that previous (之前的) students didn't use," Sun Run, a high school student from Hangzhou.
Though China has met difficulties on the way to reusing textbooks, the government need to do something to push the second-hand textbook business in the schools. We should go ahead with the project for the future development.
