September/October 2006
Magazines are recycled at a lower rate than other paper products. Though there’s great potential to increase the supply, the primary domestic buyers—newsprint mills—are seeing their markets shrink, leaving recyclers to look for exports.
By Rachel H. Pollack
Back in 1992, Scrap reported that only 10 percent of old magazines were being recycled. Paper industry experts thought demand would increase, however, because of a new flotation deinking process that required the clay-coated groundwood paper on which most magazines and catalogs are printed. The Magazine Publishers of America predicted that, by the turn of the century, 60 percent of all magazines would be recycled.
That prediction was about half right. By 2000, the magazine recycling rate had reached 32 percent, and it has barely budged since. A new group has focused its attention on raising magazine recycling rates through public education, which it believes is the main barrier. But with domestic demand for OMG stagnant or dropping, recyclers have little incentive to increase their collection of this grade or separate it from mixed paper.
The Supply Side
About 2.3 million tons of magazines are printed in the United States, and 33 percent, or 750,000 tons, is recycled, according to 2003 data collected by Franklin Associates (Prairie Village, Kan.). The magazine recycling rate still lags far behind newspapers, 83 percent of which were recycled that year, and office paper, 56 percent, according to Franklin data.
Recycled magazines come from two basic sources: newsstand returns and businesses and residences. (Printers’ overruns are sold as several different grades of paper, and they’re routinely recycled.) Newsstand returns attracted the attention of environmentalists in the late 1980s, when one organization reported that more than 1.2 billion unsold magazines were discarded in 1989 alone. Today it’s estimated that 62 percent of magazines distributed to newsstands are returned unsold.
In the 1980s, the recycling of newsstand returns was complicated by a distribution system that involved more than 350 different companies. A series of industry consolidations in the mid-1990s left only four major magazine distributors in the United States. One company, Nationwide Magazine Recycling (Irving, Texas), brokers the recycling of returns for three of those four companies, or about 70 percent of all newsstand returns. Company president and co-owner Roy Threlkeld estimates his company handles between 22,000 and 27,000 tons of magazines a month. Because his business partner also owns one of the major magazine distribution companies, he explains, Nationwide can use that network of more than 800 trucks to pick up returns at the same time new issues are being distributed across the country.
Publishers have fairly exacting requirements to ensure that newsstand returns don’t reenter the marketplace, Threlkeld says. For the distributor to receive credit for returned magazines, the bar code on “each issue of every title has to be scanned [to show] that it hasn’t been sold,” he explains. “Most return rooms are computerized, but you still have to feed the scanners manually. It’s a fairly labor-intensive deal.”
Then the magazines must be destroyed, either in shredders attached to balers or in an air-pressure system that can process as much as 6,000 feet of paper a minute. Despite this complicated process, a recent study commissioned by Time Inc. (New York) and International Paper Co. (Stamford, Conn.) found that 95 percent of newsstand returns are now recycled.
Increasing Residential Collections
That’s all well and good, but of the 362 million magazines sold in the United States in 2005, only about 13 percent were sold on newsstands. The vast majority of them are sold via subscription, and more have been sold via subscription each year for the past decade. Only 17 percent of home-delivered magazines get recycled, according to the Time and International Paper study. To get readers to recycle more magazines, the recycling message must reach them in their homes and offices.
Confusion is partly to blame for the low recycling rate, says Jimmy O’Connor with the National Recycling Coalition (Washington, D.C.). More than a decade ago, paper companies would not accept coated stock in newspaper collections because they considered it a contaminant, he says. Many municipal recycling programs now accept coated papers, but the public has not yet gotten the message of the change.
In 2004 the NRC teamed up with Time and International Paper to form Recycling Magazines is Excellent, or ReMIX, a partnership to promote magazine and catalog recycling. The partners sought participation from interested communities that already accept magazines and catalogs in their curbside recycling program. ReMIX began with two pilot projects, in Boston and Prince George’s County, Md., just outside of Washington, D.C. More recently the group has launched projects in Portland, Ore., and Milwaukee.
Central to each ReMIX project is public-service advertising through four-color, full-page ads in Time Inc. magazines delivered to subscribers in the target communities, including Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and Essence. Other promotional strategies have varied according to the community. In Boston, about 250,000 households
received refrigerator magnets with the magazine recycling message, O’Connor says. In Prince George’s County, “the county employees’ paychecks had a paragraph about ReMIX, how the county was supporting it, and what [employees] could do to help at home,” he says. “In Milwaukee, we’ve had cable television ads, radio ads, and newspaper ads,” as well as an ad in a special environmental issue of the Milwaukee Journal.
In each community ReMIX secures the cooperation of the municipal recycling processor, who pulls magazines out of the total collected paper stream to measure their prevalence before, during, and after the promotional campaign. “It takes a significant commitment for the recycling processors to break away from their daily schedule to sort magazines,” O’Connor says. “What they do is physically pull out the magazines and catalogs by hand, then they weigh what they’ve pulled out.”
The promotions seem to be working. In Boston, at the end of the 26-month run of the campaign, “recycling rates for magazines and catalogs showed an increase of 17 percent,” O’Connor says. In Prince George’s County, at the 11-month point, rates are up 11 percent. The other two projects have launched too recently to show results, he says.
ReMIX’s results indicate that education and outreach can result in greater household magazine recycling, O’Connor says. “The infrastructure exists through the existing residential recycling programs, so it’s engaging residents, getting those who aren’t participating to actually participate.”
Contamination Concerns
As more people begin to recycle their magazines, paper recyclers begin to worry about contamination, both within the magazines themselves and from other materials in the recycling bin.
When someone recycles a magazine, “there might be a CD in it,” or a perfume sample, or it might still be wrapped in a polybag, notes Joel Litman with Texas Recycling/Surplus Inc. (Dallas). “You need sophisticated cleaning equipment to deal with that.” Also problematic are pressure-sensitive labels or bindings that use latex or other glues that are not water-soluble. “Those are deadly to mills,” Litman says. “Mills will run the other way if they get those because latex glue is very difficult to recycle. Technology is coming [that will give mills] a way to use those labels, but in the meantime they just don’t want them.”
Bob Tucker, director of recoveredpaper for Bowater, knows a little something about recycled magazines. Bowater is possibly the largest consumer of OMG in the United States, using more than 200,000 tons annually in its five North American recycled newsprint mills. When asked about quality issues, Tucker focuses on glass, which can contaminate the scrap paper in single-stream curbside collection programs. “Even minute amounts of glass in ONP and OMG can wreak havoc for paper mills,” he says. “We’re effective at removing glass from the pulp, but mills will tell you it’s a huge problem. It’s very abrasive, and it’s much more detrimental to equipment” than other contaminants, he says, thus mills must replace their equipment more frequently.
Tucker contends that municipal officials and recyclers should consider the value of paper compared with glass in deciding what to collect. “Paper tends to carry most recycling programs, yet we’re having glass contamination issues across the country,” he says.
Domestic Demand Down
Even with these contamination concerns, it’s likely the U.S. supply of recycled magazines will continue to grow. The same cannot be said about demand, however. The growth the domestic OMG market experienced in the 1990s has leveled off.
“I like to talk of magazines in three time periods,” says consultant Bill Moore of Moore & Associates (Atlanta). In the first period—before 1990—there was no market. Old magazines had “negative value,” he says.
In the early 1990s, most recycled newsprint mills switched to a flotation deinking process that uses ash from the fillers and coatings of coated paper to help remove the ink from newsprint. “In flotation cells, ash helps ink attach to water bubbles and float out of the [fiber],” Bowater’s Tucker explains. “Without ash, you won’t have effective ink removal; too much ash and you get ash carryover.” In other words, you only want as much ash as you need for deinking—any more than that, and you’re getting less fiber volume for your money. (Two-sided coated paper can be as much as 35 percent ash and 65 percent paper fiber. The fiber tends to be of a higher quality than ONP, but the excess ash ends up in the discarded sludge.) At the time mills first implemented this process, they found that a ratio of about 30 percent magazines to 70 percent newspapers worked most efficiently, thus the demand for OMG began to grow.
“Flotation deinking took hold in ’92, ’93, ’94,” Moore says. “For five or six years, demand and markets shot up to where [magazines] were worth more than ONP.”
The third era for recycled magazines, in Moore’s view, was from 1996 or 1997 to 2004, when prices were high and steady. In the past two years, though, prices have slipped. The lower prices and demand come from a combination of factors, the biggest of which is that mills are finding more coated paper within the ONP they buy. At the same time that newspapers are shrinking in many dimensions—smaller sheets, fewer pages, and declining readership—an increasing percentage of newspaper is actually coated inserts. “Proportionally,” Tucker says, “we see more tabloids, catalogs, and miscellaneous publications, and that product ends up in ONP.” Further, as more residential recycling programs collect magazines along with newspapers, recyclers are more likely to sell mills a mixed newspaper grade such as #7 ONP. The result is that mills need less OMG to hit the right balance for deinking.
Tucker says his mills measure the increase in coated paper in ONP by testing the ash content in finished pulp. “As we’ve seen ash content rise, it can rise to the point of a problem,” he says. “One mill in the South that used to be 30 percent to 40 percent magazines is now down to 10 percent OMG. We are finding that we now have enough clay-coated material coming in with the news that we don’t need 30 percent OMG.” Instead, the company now aims to purchase about 85 percent newspapers and 15 percent magazines, though that can vary depending on the mill and the season.
The advantage to the mills is that ONP costs less than OMG, though the difference is smaller now than in the past. OMG was selling for 10 percent to 15 percent more than ONP for five or six years, Moore says, whereas now it costs about 5 percent more. Indeed, Moore says, with prices where they are, there’s no incentive for recyclers to separate magazines from newspapers or mixed paper. “There might have been five to seven years ago,” when buyers paid a 20-percent premium for magazines, but now the expense of doing so would outweigh their value. If supply continues to increase, as Moore expects, that “will erode market price a bit more,” he says.
High Hopes for Exports
Threlkeld has seen the impact of this trend. He says domestic consumption of OMG has declined fairly significantly over the last two years, and he predicts further decline. Compensating for this somewhat, however, has been growth in exports of this grade, primarily to Asia. Nationwide Magazine Recycling exports 50 percent of its supply to Asia—up from 30 percent five years ago. He credits new mills in Korea, China, and Thailand for much of the growth. His company has a slight advantage when shipping to Asia, he adds, because “with my type of generation, it’s a single commodity. There’s a lesser degree of contamination [in comparison with] other grades.” Though data on exports of OMG are hard to find, the significant growth in paper exports—up 123 percent in the past decade—includes growth in mixed, ONP, and mechanical pulp grades, any of which might contain magazines. But overseas newsprint mills are heading in the same direction as domestic mills, Moore warns, with less need for separated magazines.
Always a Need
As U.S. newspaper readership declines, the domestic demand for newsprint declines as well. North American newsprint consumption dropped about 12 percent, nearly 1.4 million mt, from 1993 to 2003, and mills are responding. “We’ve converted several machines away from newsprint toward coated and specialty grades,” Tucker says. “People are consuming more coated paper: more inserts, specialty magazines, bulk-mail products being sent to homes, that type of thing.” Though the growth of the Web seems to be hurting newspapers, Tucker believes it’s actually strengthening magazines and catalogs. “It creates publications that didn’t exist prior to the Internet. Also, a lot of catalog mail-outs are based on Internet sales.”
There’s some irony, then, in the fact that such growth might actually hurt the domestic recycled magazine market because very little OMG goes into new coated paper. Coated paper is the most difficult and most expensive paper to make out of recycled fiber, says David Refkin, Time’s director of sustainable development. Time and other large publishing companies experimented in the early 1990s with printing on recycled-content paper, but most abandoned the practice a few years later because of the higher cost. In its 2005 sustainability report, Time attributes those higher costs to the insufficient supply of recycled paper, the more expensive production process, and the higher cost of transporting recycled paper to mills, which tend to be far from the urban areas where paper is collected. OMG works well in tissue and newsprint, Refkin says, and Time’s philosophy is to “use it in grades where it makes the most sense rather than forcing it everywhere.”
Right now domestic markets for OMG other than newsprint and tissue are nonexistent, Moore says, but export markets should help increase demand. Eventually, he expects to see more OMG recycled into new magazine paper. For the long term, Threlkeld says he’s not too worried. “As long as there’s tonnage out there, there’s going to be a market,” he says. “It might be a lesser value, but because it’s significant tonnage, there will always be a need.”
Rachel H. Pollack is editor of Scrap.
Magazines are recycled at a lower rate than other paper products. Though there’s great potential to increase the supply, the primary domestic buyers—newsprint mills—are seeing their markets shrink, leaving recyclers to look for exports.