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Magazines are our friends. We turn to them for page after page of gossip, fashion, news, sports and more.
But with the growing awareness of environmental impacts, you may have started feeling guilty about sacrificing oxygen-generating trees for the bounty of your ever-growing "to read" pile.
Good news. The behemoth industry, represented by its premiere trade association, the Magazine Publishers Association (MPA), is on the case.
Magazine Recyling: The Low Hanging Fruit
As simple as it seems, recycling magazines is at the forefront of the magazine industry's eco initiative since only 20% of magazines in the U.S. are currently recycled! We spoke to Jeremy Koch, Executive Vice President of Consumer Marketing at the MPA who cited two vital magazine recycling campaigns:
- ReMix: Led by the National Recycling Coalition, Time Inc., Hearst, and others, this campaign has been rolled out in major metro areas including New York, Boston, Portland, OR; Washington D.C. and Milwaukee. Public service ads encouraging recycling mags are everywhere from NYC taxi cabs to local television, radio and print outlets.
- Please Recycle: A special Please Recycle logo, designed by the MPA, will soon be printed in millions of magazines in prominent locations like the Table of Contents. The logo will become synonymous with a simple but strong reminder to recycle your magazine after reading.
Controlling Extra Copies: Win Win
Another key MPA initiative is to improve the efficiency of the magazine business vis-a-vis waste.
Using data driven intelligence that's greatly improved over the last ten years, publishers are now able to deliver more accurate numbers of magazines to newsstands, book stores and other outlets. This, in turn, means less waste when copies go unsold. Publishers print less, which saves them money, so everyone wins!
This increased efficiency has helped keep 450 million magazines from being unnecessarily produced according to a recent MPA study.
Certified Paper Pages
MPA is devoted to informing magazine publishers about the environmental benefits of greener paper choices.
Working with certifiers like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and others, the goal is to get magazines to constantly increase the percent of paper fiber that hails from certifiably managed forests. Forests grown and monitored in an environmentally conscious way maximizes them as renewable resources.
So keep buying and reading your favorite mags but make sure make sure you recycle them...and remind friends and family to do the same!
This post was inspired by G Word.
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