Every kind of paper conveys a message. Publication papers are selected with great care, and today eco-labelled paper is becoming increasingly important.
The magazines stacked on the coffee table show this year’s trends in fashion and interior design attractively wrapped in covers made of thick, glossy paper. The TV guide is crinkled and crumpled, signaling “you can throw me in the recycling bin in a week – nothing to be saved.” There’s also a newsletter here from a development aid organization whose message is “Your help is needed.” That’s where the latest trend is most visible – communicating an environmental attitude by publishing magazines on paper seen as environmentally friendly.
“The trend is especially clear among charity and volunteer organizations,” says Matthew Jolly, production director at John Brown Media in London, which creates newsletters, brochures and catalogs for a large number of companies and organizations both in Britain and beyond.
The choice of paper has become part of the message. It’s not just factors like price or image reproduction that determine what paper a publication will be printed on.
“A paper that’s more matte is seen by many people as more environmentally friendly for the simple reason that they think paper with a rougher appearance should quite simply be rougher,” Jolly says. “They think this even though paper made from pulp of recycled paper is not automatically more environmentally friendly, and often it’s more expensive than paper made from fresh fibres.”
Nonetheless the trend seems to be spreading to the more commercial market. The British TV chef Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Magazine, which is published by John Brown Media, is typical of the trend. Printed on a white rustic paper that gives the magazine an almost coarse-grained look, the publication stands out among other food magazines selling food fashions and recipes with more traditional glossy covers.
“What’s most important is that the paper is certified and comes from a renewable source,” Jolly says.
More and more companies are requiring that the paper used is eco-labeled, regardless of whether it is for annual reports, brochures or magazines. FSC-certified paper is one ex-ample of this. A stamp from the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is a guarantee of environmentally friendly, socially beneficially and economically viable use of the world’s forest resources.
We have seen environmental trends before. Back in the first half of the 1990s, it was all about unbleached.
“It was supposed to be gray, preferably, so that it really looked like it was environmentally friendly,” says Charlotta Folkelind, a paper consultant at the European wholesaler Map in Gothenburg, Sweden. “There was also legitimate discussion back then about chlorine bleach. We don’t have that problem today. There’s also different knowledge now about how white can be just as good for the environment.”
This time, she thinks environmental thinking is here to stay, and the ecolabel requirement will become increasingly important in the choice of paper. The demand for better-quality paper made from recycled paper varies:
“In Sweden and Norway, we have so much raw material that we don’t have to use recycled fibre for publications for the sake of the forest,” Folkelind says. “The trend comes from Britain and France, where they don’t have as much forestland, and people are continually developing new technology to improve recycled paper.”
Jolly confirms that this is the case in Britain. “But even here, a lot of recycled paper is made from a mixture of new and old fibres to get the glossy finish that is still best suited to most publications,” he says. “Moreover, fibres can only be recycled five or six times, so if everyone just used recycled paper, that paper would soon run out.”
So in the future as well, glossy covers will still be enticing us to read. Matthew Jolly has a hard time imagining Aston Martin presenting its new catalog of luxury sports cars in anything other than glossy packaging, which signals the good things in life.
Source: Shape no. 1, 2010
Text: Susanna Lindgren