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

[Gary Liss <gary@no.address>]

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
>
>
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Gary Liss
916-652-7850
Fax: 916-652-0485
www.garyliss.com  
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