Survey: What Do You Do With Your Old Magazines?

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The Magazine Publishers of America are taking a lesson from the bottlers and their "America-Keep it Beautiful" campaign, and asking their readers to "please recycle" as if people with blue boxes didn't know that magazines are made of paper. "The key objectives of the campaign are to overcome the lack of public awareness that magazines can be recycled in the vast majority of communities in the U.S. and, thereby, increase the percentage of used magazines that are recycled."

Right. Like the bottlers who used the campaign to shift responsibility for dealing with waste from the manufacturer to the consumer, the magazine association looks for points for promoting recycling, while Jeff Bercovici of Portfolio tells us:

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-newsstand sell-through is only 33%, resulting in 66% of all magazines on the stands being returned and pulped;
-publishers buy junk circulation from subscription agents to keep their ad rates artificially high, resulting in millions of unwanted copies being pushed each month on people who will never read them.

Since you are reading this online we are probably preaching to the converted, but there is a survey in here....