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[GreenYes] Re: [GreenYes]Not-so-green magazines


And on a related note, the Center for a New American Dream is
actively pushing a Do Not Junk Mail campaign:

www.newdream.org

On Feb 27, 2007, at 12:32 PM, Gary Liss wrote:

> This is a great article highlighting an opportunity for Zero Waste
> communities to get involved. If you're interested in helping with
> the campaign to get magazines to really go Green, contact:
> Coop America Magazine Paper Project, go to: http://
> www.coopamerica.org/programs/woodwise/publishers/magazines/
> index.cfm or contact Frank Locantore, WoodWise Program Director,
> 1612 K St NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20006, (800) 58-GREEN,
> <frank@no.address>
> Susan Kinsella, Executive Director, Conservatree, Phone -
> 415/561-6526, E-mail Fax - 509/756-6987, susan@no.address,
> skype - susanekinsella, http://www.conservatree.org
> They can highlight how you could make a difference with this campaign.
>
> Gary
>
>> From: "Eric Lombardi" <eric@no.address>
>> To: "'Greenyes'" <GreenYes@no.address>
>> Subject: [GreenYes] FW: [PaperNet] Not-so-green magazines
>> Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 13:00:37 -0700
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: papernetwork@no.address
>> [ mailto:papernetwork@no.address]
>> On Behalf Of Conrad MacKerron
>> Sent: Monday, February 26, 2007 4:55 PM
>> To: papernetwork@no.address
>> Subject: [PaperNet] Not-so-green magazines
>>
>> Not-so-green magazines
>> Some glossies cover the environment, but cover up their own
>> practices, says
>> Fortune's Marc Gunther.
>>
>> By Marc Gunther, Fortune senior writer
>> February 22 2007: 9:34 AM EST
>>
>> http://money.cnn.com/2007/02/21/magazines/fortune/
>> pluggedin_Gunther_greenmags.fortune/index.htm?
>> section=money_topstories
>>
>> NEW YORK (Fortune) -- The New Yorker won awards for its stories about
>> climate change and Vanity Fair publishes a "green" issue, but just
>> try to
>> find parent company Conde Nast's environmental policy. You can't.
>>
>> Newsweek ran a cover on "The Greening of America," but its owner, The
>> Washington Post Co., won't identify the magazine's paper suppliers
>> or say
>> where its paper comes from. Maybe The Post's Bob Woodward should
>> investigate.
>>
>> As for Hearst, which publishes Oprah's magazine and Cosmopolitan, the
>> privately held firm is developing an environmental policy to
>> govern its
>> paper buying. But the company won't provide details.
>>
>> "The magazine industry's hypocrisy runs deep," asserts Todd Paglia,
>> executive director of Forest Ethics, an environmental group that
>> protects
>> forests by holding companies accountable for their paper buying.
>>
>> "Conde Nast," Paglia goes on, "is seemingly unaware of the
>> strangeness of
>> doing a high-profile series in The New Yorker on climate change,
>> while
>> exacerbating the problem by using environmentally irresponsible
>> paper."
>> Conde Nast did not return emails or calls seeking comment.
>>
>> The reluctance of publishers to talk about their environmental impact
>> suggests that they aren't paying attention - or that they want to
>> avoid it.
>> That makes a project undertaken by a group of paper users -
>> including the
>> Time Inc. division of Time Warner (Charts), the German publisher Axel
>> Springer, Random House UK, which is a unit of Bertelsmann, and
>> packaging
>> firm Tetra Pak - all the more unusual.
>>
>> Those companies are all big customers of Stora Enso (Charts), a
>> Finnish-Swedish paper, packaging and forest products giant based
>> in London.
>> With Stora Enso, they formed a partnership to track their supply
>> chain into
>> the heart of Russia's forests to try to insure that it is
>> harvested in a
>> sustainable way.
>>
>> Ordinarily, I try not to write about Time Inc., which publishes
>> Fortune and
>> CNNMoney.com. This story is an exception because the company's
>> environmental
>> practices deserve recognition.
>>
>> Time Inc. joined with Nike (Charts), Staples (Charts), Hewlett
>> Packard
>> (Charts) and the nonprofit group Metafore in 2003 to form the
>> Paper Working
>> Group to promote environmentally preferable paper. It worked with
>> environmental groups to measure its greenhouse gas emissions, and set
>> reduction targets. It discloses its paper suppliers and bought
>> about 70
>> percent of its paper from sources certified as sustainable during
>> 2006, up
>> from 25 percent four years earlier.
>>
>> As the world's largest magazine publisher, Time Inc. acted partly
>> to avoid
>> becoming a target. (In 1994, Greenpeace activists protested the
>> company's
>> forestry practices by climbing the Time & Life Building in New
>> York.) But
>> its work also has been driven by the passion of David Refkin, a
>> Bronx-born
>> accountant who joined the company in 1982, took charge of its
>> paper buying
>> in the late 1980s and is now its director of sustainable development.
>>
>> Cleaning up the supply chain
>> Refkin, 49, has tracked the company's paper to the woods of Maine,
>> Wisconsin
>> and Michigan, in an effort to promote sustainable forestry. "I
>> once went to
>> Iron Mountain, Mich., to have breakfast with 375 loggers," he
>> says. "They
>> wanted to have me for breakfast."
>>
>> Over the years, he has become an environmentalist. He is the board
>> president
>> of a nonprofit called the National Recycling Coalition and even
>> nudged a
>> friend who operates a Vermont ski resort to buy electricity from
>> wind. "If
>> you're in a business that depends on the weather," he reasons,
>> "you ought to
>> buy green power."
>>
>> Refkin turned his attention to Russia because Stora Enso, a Time Inc.
>> supplier, imports wood from Russia. The partners in a project
>> called "From
>> Russia With Transparency" identified two logging companies in
>> Russia, and
>> worked with them to improve their environmental practices so that
>> they can
>> obtain certification from the Forest Stewardship Council, an
>> independent
>> body. (One company, Russkiy Les, expects to be certified this
>> year.) The
>> group also tackled worker safety and corruption, both serious
>> issues in
>> Russia.
>>
>> Americans, Germans, Brits, Finns, Swedes and Russians collaborated
>> on the
>> project. "How many wars have been fought between those countries?"
>> Refkin
>> mused. "The culture challenges were enormous." The American and
>> European
>> buyers had to be careful not to push around the Russian suppliers.
>>
>> Two nonprofit groups, Transparency International and the Karelian
>> Research
>> Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, monitored the project.
>> A detailed
>> report on the project, as well as a video, can be found at
>> www.tikhvinproject.ru/.
>>
>> Why should publishers go to the trouble of cleaning up their
>> supply chain?
>> Florian Nehm, sustainability officer for Axel Springer, which
>> publishes
>> magazines and newspapers, said companies should be concerned not
>> just about
>> the visible quality of paper but its "invisible" quality as well -
>> its
>> environmental and social impact.
>>
>> "There are 3,000 journalists working for Axel Springer," Nehm
>> says. "They
>> criticize everything and everyone, and they can only do that with
>> credibility if the company that they work for has adequate
>> standards of its
>> own."
>>
>> That should be a wake-up call to other publishers. Those who ignore
>> environmental issues may be putting their reputations at risk.
>>
>> Publishers will be happy to hear that Forest Ethics - which ran a
>> successful
>> campaign against the Victoria's Secret catalog and its parent
>> company,
>> Limited Brands (Charts), last year - says it will remain focused on
>> catalogs, not magazines, for now. But Paglia says the group
>> intends to look
>> at magazines and their paper, perhaps as soon as next year.
>>
>> ___________________
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Conrad MacKerron
>> Director, Corporate Social Responsibility Program
>> As You Sow Foundation
>> 311 California St., San Francisco, CA 94104
>> Phone: 415-391-3212, ext. 31
>> Web: www.asyousow.org
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Gary Liss
>> 916-652-7850
>> Fax: 916-652-0485
>> www.garyliss.com
>> >>

David Jaber
Natural Logic
510-248-4941
djaber@no.address

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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