I was in New York today, and I saw in one of the subway stations a big ad for a recycling initiative for magazines and catalogs that was recently launched in New York by Mayor Bloomberg. It is called: ReMix- Recycling Magazines is Excellent.ReMix is a national public education campaign aimed at increasing residential recycling of magazines and catalogs. The campaign conducted pilot programs in Boston, Milwaukee, and Portland. Now the campaign is bringing the need to recycle magazines and catalogs to the attention of the New Yorkers with promotions on buses, taxis, subc\ways, in movie theatres, on cable television, on billboards and in full-page public service advertisements in consumer magazines. The total budget of the campaign in NY is above $3 million.
According to the Environment News Service (ENN), The ReMix campaign began when a study by Time Inc. and Verso Paper found that while 95 percent of all unsold newsstand magazines are recycled by newsstands and publishers, only about 17 percent of sold magazines are recycled. Just for comparison - Verso CEO, Mike Jackson mentioned on the ENN report that today, 53.4 percent - of all paper consumed in the United States is recovered for reuse.
ENN points out correctly that the there's no problem nowadays to recycle glossy paper used from magazines and catalogs. Currently, all community recycling programs accept magazines and catalogs for recycling.
This is great initiative and I hope it will motivate people to take action and significantly increase the magazines and catalogs they recycle. It's relatively easy and it's doing good twice, by keeping this paper out of landfills and by letting companies resuse it instead of virgin paper to make new paper products.
Here's the 2008 ReMix TV spot (from YouTube):
This is also a good opportunity to remind you on a (relatively) new initiative to eliminate in advance the unwanted catalogs you receive on your mail - Catalog Choice, which I wrote about here in the past (and it's a free service!)
Enjoy recycling!
Raz @ Eco-Libris
Eco-Libris: plant a tree for every book you read!
