Month: September 2010

Politicians concerned about the climate change and the environment ought to take a look at the Australian magazine distribution model.

Every week we remove several trolley loads of unsold magazines from our shelves and either dump them for recycling or create more carbon emissions by returning unsold stock to the supplier warehouse.  I am sure that this process is repeated in newsagencies across the country.

Beyond the labour, real-estate and opportunity cost to newsagents of magazines which fail to sell, there is a significant cost to the environment of the current magazine distribution model:

• The carbon footprint of overseas magazine titles being freighted to Australia is significant when compared to locally printed titles.  Do we really need an overseas title competing with a locally produced title?
• The carbon footprint of a returns system which requires around half of unsold stock to be returned to the magazine distributor – presumably to be sent somewhere else for a second crack at a sale – is for dubious economic value.
• The wastage of unsold stock which is left to be trashed locally.  Not all unsold magazines are recycled.  There is also the carbon cost of sending this underperforming stock in the first place to be considered.

If you take the top 200 magazines out of the mix you soon see a serious level of paper and carbon waste in the magazine distribution model.  There are titles which consistently sell under 50% of what are sent to many newsagencies.  While complaints always bring out excuses, there is no excuse which justifies such waste and damage to the environment.

There is no penalty on magazine distributors for supplying more magazines than they know will sell.  Some publishers operate under a model where underperforming titles do not harm their bottom line.  This lack of a penalty could be a factor in the environmental laziness of the model.

I would welcome politicians (the Greens with the balance of power in the Senate from next year?) to look at the magazine model from the perspective of its impact on the environment for this would bring issues of concern to newsagents into focus.

There ought to be an acceptable return percentage agreed and a penalty imposed, to be paid to newsagents, for titles which do not meet this minimum  standard.  Further, such titles ought to be able to be recycled locally rather than returned as full copy returns.

This is good an avenue of investigation for newsagents – pursuing the magazine model as an environmental issue rather than purely a newsagent economics issue.

I raised this with Bob Brown’s office during the election and plan to raise it again once the current dust storm settles.