Vanity Un-Fair? Mag Drops
Plan to Use Recycled Content
It looks like Vanity Fair doesn’t practice what it preaches when it comes to its upcoming “green issue.”
Due to hit newsstands in the second week of April, the celebrity glossy had dedicated its May issue to the environment, reportedly featuring eco-friendly stars like George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, in-depth articles on topics such as global warming and printing the magazine on recycled paper.
Well, Vanity Fair has dropped the idea of using recycled paper in the issue.
“They were scrambling to do it but it was too short a time frame and they couldn’t make it happen,” says one insider.
The Conde Nast publication’s rivals at Hachette Filipacchi performed a little better - Elle’s green issue, which was edited by Laurie David (Larry David’s wife) and includes articles by Cameron Diaz, will include 10% recycled content.
So, when you pick up the May issue of VF and start reading the eco-friendly articles, don’t feel too smug about your increased environmental consciousness.
That single issue involved the destruction of thousands of trees and it was printed using chlorine and other chemicals. Specifically, that issue probably used up to 2,247 tons of pulp, and produced up to 4,331,757 pounds of greenhouse gases,13,413,922 gallons of wastewater, and 1,744,060 pounds of solid waste throughout the printing process.
That’s according to our calculation of VF’s monthly circulation times the weight of its paper and then inputting that tonnage into the Paper Calculator, which was developed by Environmental Defense to calculate the environmental impacts of printing.
A spokeswoman for Vanity Fair did not return calls for comment.
“We were excited to see that Elle and Vanity Fair would do at least one issue with recycled paper,” says Susan Kinsella, the executive editor of Conservatree, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for environmental paper. She started the Magazine Paper project about five years ago to encourage more publications to use recycled content.
Currently, only a few magazines use recycled content - including Body & Soul, Shape, Natural Health, Plenty, and Ranger Rick. In the past, magazine publishers have been skeptical that they can achieve the high-end look of their glossy pages using recycled content. “But the truth is that you can get high quality - look at National Geographic, their cover page is 10% post-consumer recycled content,” says Kinsella.
In general, newspapers have been much more receptive, using over 20% recycled content across the board. Some of this is due to the cheaper quality of newspaper stock and to laws passed in recent decades - in California, state law requires that 40% of newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee and the San Jose Mercury News use recycled content.
But the magazine industry is starting to adjust. In recent years, they have switched to different types of bleaching by using a chlorine derivative that produces less dioxin, cut back on some of the waste they’ve generated and started using lighter paper requiring less wood pulp.
“A number of magazines have been exploring using recycled content in their papers,” says Frank Locantore, director of the Magazine PAPER project at the nonprofit group Co-op America, who cites Time Inc.’s director of sustainability, David Refkin, as one of the few people in the magazine world who takes this issue seriously. “At this point, it’s an issue of cost, look, availability.”
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11 Responses to “Vanity Un-Fair? Mag Drops
Plan to Use Recycled Content”
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March 30th, 2006 at 7:13 pm
After all that publicity, they may sell more issues. Thanks for pointing out the paper waste. Wonder how many issues get read and recycled.
March 31st, 2006 at 10:59 am
Doesn’t recycling paper still use more energy and water than cutting trees down?
March 31st, 2006 at 5:30 pm
Goes to show that ‘voluntary’ standards are worthless–even people WHO know better won’t follow ‘green’ guidelines.
Industry standards must be made mandatory and strict and to hell with ‘profitability’ as an issue in this debate–irrelevent.
April 1st, 2006 at 8:29 am
Another technical question: how much energy, water, etc., does it take to recycle paper suitable for use in magazines?
Surely some bleaching and other processing is required.
Not to take VF off the hook, but I’d like to know how to compare the costs of using new versus recycled paper.
April 1st, 2006 at 2:47 pm
[...] From Muckracked: So, when you pick up the May issue of VF and start reading the eco-friendly articles, don’t feel too smug about your increased environmental consciousness. [...]
April 1st, 2006 at 4:45 pm
[...] As Seen In muckraked.com It looks like Vanity Fair doesn’t practice what it preaches when it comes to its upcoming “green issue.”Due to hit newsstands in the second week of April, the celebrity glossy had dedicated its May issue to the environment, reportedly featuring eco-friendly stars like George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, in-depth articles on topics such as global warming and printing the magazine on recycled paper. [...]
April 3rd, 2006 at 1:58 pm
energy and bleach are used to make paper. better to recycle it and not have to cut down the trees again.
April 17th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
Even after adding in the transportation for recycling, making recycled paper uses far less water and total energy than making paper from trees. (There’s a lot of transportation to get trees to paper mills, too.) Recycled paper also produces much less pollution and of course it reduces the need to cut trees, which protects forests. Compare recycled and virgin papers using Environmental Defense’s Paper Calculator at http://www.papercalculator.org.
April 25th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
I picked up a copy of the VF green issue for a bus journey- some interesting articles but pretty tame overall and with no concept of the link between the push to consume consume consume (all those noxious perfume/watch/diamond ads)and ‘green’ issues - climate change is covered but not a whiff about the looming energy crises (and we’re back to consume…) it was the usual ‘buy this product because it’s cool’stuff and really failed to join the dots. There was NO reference to the paper or print stats (perfectly obvious that it was the standard ultra glossy fare) and it strikes me that you just have to look at Adbusters magazine for an example of the outstanding print quality that can be achieved using 100% de-inked recycled paper, processed chlorine free.
January 7th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
I don’t understand why they don’t use recycled content well if the government would just step up and pass recycled content laws EPA a bunch of cowards to stand up against Bush.
June 24th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Out of curiosity, I compared the 2008 “green” issue with the January and February ‘08 issues, the three that were available at my gym. Ironically, the “green” issue contains over 100 more pages than the January and February issues. Those extra 100+ pages are mostly ads and fluff, with far less “green” content than I would have expected. Two years on, it appears that Vanity Fair still does not grasp the true meaning of “green.”