Australian Newsagency Blog

I made a rare use of Melbourne’s train system yesterday evening to get to the MCG for the Collingwood Hawthorn AFL game. In one carriage I counted more than 50 copies of the day’s MX newspaper left on seats and on the floor. That suggests the train probably had close to 300 discarded copies of MX. Multiply 300 by the number of trains used during peak hour and the operators cold be dealing with anything from 25,000 to 50,000 copies of MX discarded every day. Is this a problem with free commuter newspapers globally or is what I saw local to my train line or local to Melbourne? I’d be interested to find out whether trash is a problem with free commuter newspapers and if so why are we not hearing about it? I should note that there were only two other items of trash on seats of the floor in my carriage.