Three, or Maybe Four, Green Magazine Pioneers

While some magazine publishers get plenty of PR mileage from using paper with recycled content, the real leaders in making U.S. magazines greener have gone largely unheralded.

In a recent interview with Publishing Executive, I named three publishing companies that have been “industry pioneers” in making printed products greener. I had a fourth pioneer in mind as well but disqualified it from the list. More on that later.

Here are my green heroes:

Wenner Media
I’ve previously praised U.S. News & World Report for using Catalyst Cooled “manufactured carbon-neutral paper” throughout its “green” issue this year, but it was really following in the footsteps of Wenner’s Rolling Stone magazine. Two years ago, Wenner began changing the industry’s thinking on the environment away from simplistic discussions of recycled content when it announced that all of the magazine’s inside pages would be on Catalyst Cooled.

Wenner pays for a tree-planting program that offsets the already low carbon footprint of the paper. As far as I can tell, Wenner gets no PR or marketing mileage out of that commitment other than a small mention in each issue of the magazine. It is just doing the right thing, in good times and in bad.

Time Inc.
The “Evil Empire”, as competitors and even employees call Time, made a huge contribution by commissioning the extensive, landmark Heinz Center study in 2006 called "Following the Paper Trail". That study showed that the vast majority of a consumer magazine’s carbon footprint occurs at the paper mill and that the emissions of greenhouse gases vary widely from mill to mill.

Time also pioneered the ReMix (Recycling Magazines is Excellent!) advertising campaign that encourages consumers to recycle their magazines.

Check out this audio interview with Guy Gleysteen, Time Inc.’s production chief, who talks about how the company is lobbying paper suppliers on such issues as carbon footprint and sustainable forestry. He’s especially interesting when talking about the company’s motivation for these actions and why Time doesn't mention them in its marketing to consumers.

“The issues that you’d want to educate people on are complex and are not readily described in one or two lines that would appeal to a consumer,” says Gleysteen. He adds that Time’s efforts are about “putting our company into a position where we can be trusted relative to the resources that we use.”

Hearst
Being green seems to permeate the company’s culture, from its award-winning LEED-certified headquarters in New York to the rooftop worm farms (Ooh, gross!) that recycle waste from its Good Housekeeping kitchens in London (Oh. Cool!).

“By the end of 2008, 70% of our magazine paper comprised certified fiber. We have set an interim goal of 80% by the end of 2009,” says the publisher’s "Being Green" report, perhaps the best example of environmental transparency in the U.S. publishing industry. As part of that effort, Hearst and Time went public this week with their campaign to help small forest owners in Maine get certified.

“Being Green” addresses the recycled issue clearly and correctly: “Hearst is currently using more than 15% post-consumer recycled (PCR) paper across its portfolio of publications, primarily in the newsprint we buy. After extensive review, we currently believe newspapers and other end uses (packaging, wallboard, etc.) are the most efficient use for recycled fiber, which continues to be in short supply.”

Now for the almost fourth hero: Readers Digest Association deserves some credit for using paper with 85% recycled content throughout Every Day with Rachael Ray.

As Hearst suggests, coated paper is often not the best use for recycled pulp. But if you’re going to print a magazine in the Midwest on relatively heavy coated-groundwood paper, Myllykoski’s Alsip, IL mill is a green choice. By mixing high-brightness recycled products, such as unsold magazines and printer waste, with curbside-collected paper and virgin kraft pulp, the mill is able to make good magazine paper without bleaching. (The mill’s products are too heavy for Rolling Stone and most Time Inc. magazines, by the way.)

As with Wenner’s announcement about Catalyst Cooled, the marketing of Every Day with Her Perkiness brought much-deserved attention to a paper maker that is greener than its larger competitors.

So why am I not giving RDA as much credit for being green as Wenner, Time, and Hearst? It turns out that Myllykoski already gave Readers Digest plenty of credit: The Finnish company was left holding the bag with $1.65 million in accounts payable when RDA went Chapter 11 in August. That's not exactly a great way to reward a supplier for its environmentally friendly practices.

Do you disagree with my choices of magazine-industry green heroes? Then make your voice heard, not only by commenting on this article but also by entering the 2009 Aveda Environmental Award for Magazines.

For further reference:

• Rethinking the "Green" Magazine Issue
• Certified forestry for small Maine landowners: Does FSC certification help the earth? and More on Maine and FSC.
• Certified Forestry Is In Trouble, U.N. Report Says
• I'm an environmental idiot!: Why recycled content doesn't always make environmental sense for coated paper.
  

Rethinking the "Green" Magazine Issue

Finally! A magazine publisher is doing a “green” issue on paper that truly is environmentally friendly.

The usual approach to environmentally themed issues is to use paper with a bit of recycled content without regard to any other environmental issues or whether the recycled content is being used appropriately. But for its April issue, the “Energy and Environment Guide”, U.S. News & World Report has actually put some thought into (and dollars behind) making the issue’s paper earth friendly.

As a result, all of the issue’s body stock will be on carbon-neutral paper with fiber that has been certified as being sourced from sustainably managed forests, the publisher says. The body stock will be Electracote, a coated-mechanical paper from Catalyst Paper’s Port Alberni, British Columbia mill. Dead Tree Edition has already noted the product’s ill-advised name but has no qualms about Catalyst’s low emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that have been linked to global climate change. Its environmental record has earned it recognition from the World Wildlife Fund and other environmental groups.

“U.S. News has been looking for ways to reduce our carbon footprint," said Mark W. White, the publisher's Vice President of Manufacturing (and a member of my LinkedIn network.) "We applaud the efforts Catalyst has made to reduce its carbon footprint while maintaining the quality of its paper.”

Like most other Catalyst products, normal Electracote has a low carbon footprint because the vast majority of the mill’s energy comes from such carbon-neutral sources as hydroelectric dams and forestry waste (bark, for example). A groundbreaking study from The Heinz Center, “Following the Paper Trail,” found that a majority of American consumer magazines’ carbon footprint came from energy used to make the paper.

U.S. News is going a step further by participating in the Catalyst Cooled program, which was pioneered by Rolling Stone magazine but has had few other participants. Through Catalyst Cooled, U.S. News pays a small premium to offset what few greenhouse-gas emissions occur at the mill to make the paper. The publisher has been using Catalyst Cooled for more than a year, but this is the first time the paper will appear throughout an entire issue of the magazine.

Catalyst is careful to call Catalyst Cooled paper “manufacturing carbon neutral” because the offset only covers mill emissions, not what occurs elsewhere, such as transport to and from the mill. U.S. News says it minimizes the transport-related emissions by having paper shipped to its printer in full railcars.

Carbon offsets have been controversial because some are of questionable environmental value and because they have been seen as a license to pollute. But Catalyst has one of the best records in any industry for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. And the offsets pay for a park-reforestation program that clearly results in carbon sequestration.

What about recycled content? Here is U.S. News' answer: “Catalyst is one of the largest manufacturers and users of post-consumer recycled pulp in North America. All of that pulp goes into lower-brightness products like newsprint. The yield (the amount of recycled pulp that ends up in the paper) is more than 85% for such products but would be less than 70% for the brighter coated paper that will be used in our April issue.” In other words, U.S. News avoided the environmentally questionable practice of upcycling.

What U.S. News does not mention is that Electracote uses far less virgin fiber than any allegedly eco-friendly coated freesheet with 30% post-consumer recycled fiber. That’s because of its light weight and the use of mostly mechanical (groundwood) pulp, which consumes far less wood fiber than does chemical (kraft) pulp.

And for those who advocate recycled paper because of its supposedly lower carbon footprint, here’s an interesting tidbit from a recent Catalyst financial report: “The Company’s overall carbon footprint increased in 2008 with the acquisition of the Snowflake mill, which is located in a heavily fossil fuel-dependent jurisdiction and whose primary energy source is coal.” The Arizona mill makes newsprint solely from recycled fiber.

There’s a place for both recycled content that is used appropriately and for virgin fiber from sustainably managed forests. Catalyst’s approach is a good model to follow – processing lots of recycled paper into pulp, using that pulp in the most environmentally appropriate products, obtaining most of its virgin fiber from sawmill residuals, supporting sustainable forestry, working to reduce its energy consumption, and trying to get more of that energy from carbon-neutral sources.

Is Catalyst really more virtuous than most other profit-driven paper companies? (And when was the last time you saw “profit” and “paper company” in the same sentence?)

Enlightened management is part of the story, but for the most part its location in British Columbia shapes its environmental outlook. Native peoples there have been practicing sustainable forestry for centuries. Hydroelectric power is abundant. Vigorous debates and boycotts shook its paper and forestry industries in the 1990s. BC has probably the strictest forestry regulations in North America. And there’s little debate in the province about whether global climate change is real – not when a plague of beetles spurred by unusually warm winters is chewing up its stunningly beautiful forests.

“Recycled content” may be an easy sell to consumers. But let’s hope more publishers (and other users of paper) start doing something about their carbon footprints as well.

I'm an environmental idiot!

I used to think that using post-consumer recycled content to make paper was good, that cutting trees to make paper was bad, and that online editions were greener than “dead-tree” editions. Silly me.

It's taken me years to realize that using post-consumer waste (PCW) in North America to make magazine-quality paper not only does not “save trees”, it’s often actually bad for the environment. The problem is “up-cycling”, the use of low-quality recycled material (such as post-consumer newsprint) to make higher-quality products, such as coated and supercalendered papers.

“Up-cycling of fibers wastes an additional 400 pounds of fiber per ton to make high-quality recycled paper,” states the Association of American Publishers Handbook on Book Paper and the Environment, which does a nice job explaining up-cycling and down-cycling. PCW usually has to be deinked and bleached to make higher-quality papers. There is no such fiber loss when the PCW instead goes into products like cardboard. So insisting that North American mills include PCW in the paper we buy merely bids up the price of that fiber and diverts it from more ecologically appropriate uses. For that reason, at least one publisher has asked its North American paper suppliers not to put post-consumer waste into its paper.

The situation is different in some European countries, where waste streams for office paper (mostly uncoated freesheet) and magazine/catalog paper are kept separate from lower-grade products like newsprint. To get such high-quality recycled fiber in North America generally means using pre-consumer fiber, such as printer waste and unsold newsstand copies.

An argument often made for recycled fiber is that it has a lower carbon footprint than virgin fiber. That is a gross over-generalization that often is simply not true. Pulp and paper mills relying on virgin fiber tend to get their energy from biomass (such as bark) and hydroelectricity. Making pulp from PCW may require less energy, but that energy typically comes from natural gas and coal-fired electricity.

As an environmentalist, it pains me that so much of the guidance the environmental movement has offered regarding paper purchasing, however well intentioned, has been misleading. Take the idea that cutting trees is bad.

Deforestation is definitely harmful to the environment, but there is little correlation in North America between forestry and deforestation. Agriculture and urban development are much larger despoilers of forests.

“To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less,” says Dr. Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace and more recently of Greenspirit. “Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.”

And how about the idea that it’s greener to publish a digital or Web edition than to put ink on paper? There is nothing green about all the electricity it takes to power Web servers and keep them cool. You can buy carbon-neutral paper, but I haven’t heard of any carbon-neutral PCs.

Global climate change is the key environmental issue of our generation, so our green efforts should focus on minimizing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. For me, when I buy paper, that means selecting mills that use earth-friendly fiber (whether from sustainable forestry or from appropriate recycled content) and emit few greenhouse gases, then having the paper transported in the most energy-efficient manner (e.g. rail instead of truck).

Disagree? Then speak up. I am willing to publish other viewpoints as long as they are well-reasoned and well written; you can email them to dead.tree.edition@gmail.com. Or just click the “Comment” button at the end of this post to share your immediate, unedited response. If we’re going to preserve the Earth as we know it, we need to have more intelligent discussions and debates and fewer knee-jerk reactions and oversimplifications.