"Horror - woman abandons Metro on train": DMGT's new recycling campaign

Posted by Marion Geiger on March 18, 2009 at 2:34 PM

Have you ever tried to sit down on the subway and found that a newspaper had already taken your seat? Daily Mail and General Trust launched a campaign asking readers of the free newspaper, Metro, to recycle their copies instead of leaving them around. Advertisements around the UK show pictures of a neglected Metro on a bus-seat with headlines such as, 'Horror - woman abandons Metro on train' followed by, 'leaving your Metro behind is littering. Please take it away and recycle it.'

Print news is often criticized for the amount of trees and paper it requires to create a newspaper that later ends up in a landfill. Meanwhile, the Internet gets credit for being a "carbon neutral" solution to the problem. However, researchers showed in January that a simple Google search can produce up to 7g of CO2; the Internet may be just as harmful to the environment as paper consumption.

Metro's campaign and other similar movements show how print is taking steps to reduce its image as an environmental evil. The National Association of Paper Merchants' claims on its website that paper is one of the few fully renewable and recyclable resources in the world, equipping print with a little more gumption when facing the power of Internet.

Source: printweek.com