[GreenYes] FW: [PaperNet] Not-so-green magazines

["Eric Lombardi" <eric@no.address>]

-----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_greenmag
s.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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