About This Paper
When editor Bruce Allar first approached me with the idea of doing a “Green Issue” of Louisville, I knew it was time to seriously consider using recycled paper in this magazine. I’d made half-hearted inquiries in the past, but had always been told by our printer (Publishers Press, in Shepherdsville) that it was more expensive and, besides, they didn’t carry a “house” brand of recycled paper in the weight that we used. I never pursued it any further.
This time I did, and here’s what I learned: Yes, you can buy recycled paper in quantities small enough to make it somewhat affordable for a magazine of our size (an average monthly print run of about 28,000 copies and an average issue of a little more than 100 pages), but you do pay a premium — a 9 percent premium, to be exact. Since paper costs represent about 20 percent of our total printing bill, using recycled would increase our monthly print bills by a little less than 2 percent. I deemed that an acceptable premium to pay.
So, dear reader, behold: The paper in this magazine is, to use the industry’s terms of art, guaranteed to be at least 20 percent “post-consumer” content and 90 percent “recovered” content. That means that almost all of it is recycled but only 20 percent is guaranteed to have been used by an /files/storyimages/consumer.
The people who make it, Myllykoski North America in Alsip, Ill., told me they recycle paper from three main sources: unsold newspapers (in this case, mostly Chicago Sun-Times copies), printing-plant waste paper, and what they call MURF — paper from Municipal Urban Recycling Facilities — which is the stuff we city dwellers put in those orange bins we haul to the curb each week.
They also told me a lot more about their manufacturing process that I don’t have room to include, such as their state-of-the-art de-inking machines and how they retooled an old newsprint production plant that used to spew out tons of volatile organic compounds to one that now emits virtually zero VOCs per year.
Since I’m writing this a couple of weeks before this issue will be printed, I can’t yet judge the paper’s quality. I’ll let you do that, and please let me know what you think about it.
