1000 Flowers for the Planet - #21 Share Your Magazines
Magazines have
quite an environmental footprint. For this Flower I shall only be talking about
printed magazines as opposed to electronic magazines, which have their own set
of environmental issues.
Print
magazines begin as trees which need to be harvested, transported, produced into
paper, transported and finally printed using inks. That’s the production part
only. They’re then transported (again) to a point of sale where you can decide
whether or not you buy one (or more). So far there are a lot of resources that
have been used.
My first
suggestion is to stop and think about whether you need to buy a magazine in the
first place. They’re considered a throw-away item, unlike a book, which has a
greater chance of being retained on the bookshelf. Magazines have short
life-spans by their very nature. They’re designed to read once and be replaced
by the next juicy copy that catches your eye with a headline. This is how
companies make money.
I recognise
that many, many people rely on magazines for their employment. If you feel you
have to buy magazines, at least share them with your friends when you’ve
finished reading them, and ensure multiple uses before they end up in landfill.
Hopefully
they’ll be recycled though.
1 comment:
Each week, my parents & I take it in turns to do the shopping & errands for my Great-Aunty who now lives in an "assisted living facility". Every week she buys two mags, and when she's finished reading them, she gives one of them to her friend to do the puzzles and the other to Mum & me. When Mum's read it & pulled out the recipes, I get it to read and do all the puzzles. If they're recent ones, I drop them in to my hairdresser or doctor's surgery. Believe me, each mag gets read any number of times before it gets put in the recycle! S x
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