what's wrong with free newspapers?

In 53 different countries around the world there are 42 million free newspapers being printed every day. The environmental impact of a product that has a designed life span of 20 minutes is being seriously overlooked.

Here are some stats and figures from one day of freesheet production - It takes 12 established trees to make one tonne of newsprint, which is enough to print 14,000 editions of an average-size tabloid. That means a daily usage of newsprint of a little over 2557 tonnes. Which, in turn, means the felling of 30,684 trees. Not directly, of course, as 70 per cent of paper used by the newspaper industry is claimed to be 'recycled'. On the face of it this 'saves' 21,478 trees, meaning that 'only' 9206 trees are felled daily to feed the freesheet print presses across the world.

However, you have to remember that recycled paper has to come from somewhere, a virgin source, at some time. Executives of London based Associated Newspapers and News International Free Newspapers Ltd make great play of the possibility that the London Lite or the londonpaper you're reading today could be the same paper that you read two weeks ago - ie, it has been recycled. This is nonsense. To start with, recycled paper can only be used in newspapers a maximum of five or six times before the fibres become too short. Recycling may delay destruction. It does not confer immortality.

And as we all know, for paper to be recycled it has to be separated out from other rubbish, such as cans and food waste, etc. Freesheets are designed and marketed as '20-minute reads'. In other words, they have no retention value and none of the publishers expect them to be retained. Hence they are dumped on trains and station platforms, or on the streets or in the municipal bins surrounding the public transport networks. At present waste sub-contractors admit to only recycling around 20 per cent of rubbish that is left on the public transport networks. Whilst local authorities are still not able to recycle rubbish collected from public litter bins.

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