Rolls of paper get inked at Quebecor, DISCOVER's printing press in Jonesboro, Arkansas.
Photography by Jeffrey Jacobs
On the Road with DISCOVER
From the printing plant, the magazines split along two paths. If you are a subscriber, your issue joins about 600,000 others on a shipment from Jonesboro to Quebecor’s distribution facility outside Chicago. Based on the weight of those magazines (about 234,000 pounds) and the carrying capacity of a large tractor trailer (44,000 pounds), that works out to about five full freight trucks making the 540-mile journey, emitting 4.7 tons of CO2 along the way.
Near Chicago, the subscriber copies are further divided: About a quarter stay in Illinois, while the rest are sent out to six other distribution centers around the country. Using our circulation data on the number of subscribers in each state and Canadian province, along with Quebecor’s map of the states that each center serves, we figured out how many magazines go to each distribution center. After converting that load into a number of trucks and mapping how far they have to travel from Chicago, again assuming the least energy-efficient trucks on the most efficient path, we found that this trip accounts for another 7.3 tons of greenhouse gases. By a similar process, we calculated another 3.3 tons of CO2 in the next leg of the subscriber-issue journey, which takes them from the major distribution centers to postal facilities around the country.
From there, the magazines get to local post offices and reader mailboxes via the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). The USPS has already calculated its own footprint, so we estimated our portion of the total monthly weight handled by the USPS at about 1/9,200 of their monthly 2.2 billion pounds. We then took that fraction of vehicle emissions as our own, for another 16 tons of CO2 .
If you got your copy at a newsstand, it took a different path. From the printing plant in Arkansas, over 300,000 copies bound for stores were trucked to 213 wholesalers around the country and in Canada. Our newsstand consultant, T. J. Montilli, was able to provide the location of every wholesaler and the number of issues going to each, allowing us to calculate the trucking footprint to each state and Canadian province, for an additional 5.8 tons of CO2 .
In most cases, wholesalers supply every retailer within about a hundred-mile radius. Assuming that our 41,500 retailers are evenly sprinkled around wholesalers, we calculated the distance that the average magazine travels from wholesaler to retailer at about 70 miles. With each delivery, the trucks also pick up unsold issues at newsstands and return them to the wholesaler for disposal. This traffic puts another 2.3 tons of CO2 on our tab. Add 176 tons of CO2 for recycling and landfilling and the total comes to 962 tons of CO2 . This month we will purchase a carbon offset for $4,796 from Carbonfund.org, a nonprofit that will compensate for our footprint by planting trees and investing in renewable energy.
The AfterLife of a magazine
The afterlife of the magazine is up to you. Your issue of DISCOVER will end up in an incinerator, landfill, or in a plant to become new paper. Although about two-thirds of communities offer recycling, the Magazine Publishers Association reports that only about 20 percent of used magazines are recycled.
The EPA calls landfilling “net carbon negative”—meaning it removes greenhouse gases from the atmosphere—an accolade they also give to recycling, which they say does an even better job of this. But the Paper Task Force does not see the processes as carbon neutral. We used the task force’s numbers to calculate the carbon impact of recycling and throwing away magazines. Ninety percent of magazines that are not recycled end up in a landfill, where they decompose and release CO2 as well as methane, a greenhouse gas that is much more efficient at trapping heat. The rest are incinerated.
Each month’s issue of DISCOVER in this process, transportation included, releases the equivalent of 170 tons of CO2 , whereas recycled magazines—only a small portion of the total—produce about 6 tons. Beyond reducing greenhouse gases, recycling saves about 1,000 pounds of solid waste, some 10,000 gallons of water, and 17 million Btu of energy per ton of paper. Furthermore, two tons of trees per ton of paper remain standing due to recycling.
Image courtesy of Don Foley
Click the image above to track the life cycle of DISCOVER magazine
