Haymarket's eco journey gathers pace

Magazine publisher Haymarket has made solid gains in its quest to improve environmental performance throughout every facet of the company.

“I was asked just the other day, are we 90% into this or have we still got 90% of it to do, and the answer is definitely that 90% is still to do,” says Chris King, group production director of business, consumer and contract publisher Haymarket.

“We started about five years ago,” King continues, “and it’s a bit like print quality in that improving our environmental performance is a journey rather than a destination. You just have to keep looking to improve, and there is always something new to do. There’s a massive job ahead.”

Successes in environmental award schemes, including most recently a Quality in Print Media award, suggest that the publisher, which has more than 100 magazine titles, seems to be making a decent fist of the job so far however, although King modestly defers to Peter Phippen at the BBC and Sally Cartwright of Hello! magazine as the leaders in eco-friendly magazine publishing.

Haymarket is, it appears, unique as a publisher in being ISO 14001 accredited. It has also been granted both FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody and has taken steps to reduce the amount of polythene in its publication wrappings, with experiments taking place to reduce this still further (down to 12 microns, says King). Steps have been, and will continue to be, taken to reduce Haymarket’s carbon footprint: already paper is sourced exclusively from UPM-Kymmene’s mill in Scotland, and all the print is handled at Wyndeham Heron in Essex, so there are a lot fewer journeys involved in logistics and production.

Implementing all of these measures has been very time consuming and will continue to be so. King says: “We have people full-time looking at the environment and we’re thinking about stepping that up. We’re talking to suppliers about progress in the last 12 months and setting targets for continuous improvement. That’s the key thing – it does not matter where you start, you are audited by BSI that you are making year on year improvements. Once you are in, you are in for good and it’s quite demanding for time.”

The continuous improvement will see Haymarket attain 100% certified paper stocks within two years, from 75% this year. However, to be able to make that statement, King stresses that Haymarket has been an early mover and publishers only now considering this as a priority may well be caught out by the simple matter of scarcity of certified resources.

He explains: “We decided we would get first mover advantage and early resources, so we will get 100% certified. There is far less FSC certified paper available than there is PEFC, and that’s why we went for dual certification. With so many publications it would be impossible to get FSC paper for them all. If publishers leave it for 12 months they will find that all the certified paper is gone. Everyone is jumping on the bandwagon but if they have left it until now it’s probably already too late.”

"It's a bit like print quality in that improving our environmental performance is a journey rather than a detsination."

King finds it frustrating that he sometimes feels powerless to make changes in the distribution chain – the area where he feels most good can be done to Haymarket’s carbon footprint. Apart from reducing the number of journeys required and continuing to talk to the supply chain he confesses that there’s “not much I can do with distribution”.

“In some ways I am powerless, but I keep telling them they need electric vehicles, to look at rail, and at double-decker lorries. They are waking up but there’s a disconnect in the chain.”

Unsold copies are another “big time bomb”, says King, and Sales Based Replenishment (SBR) may provide part of the answer going forward. Haymarket has been testing with What Car? And eve magazines for nine months, but King says it is too early to say whether this has been a success. There are numerous models for SBR that Haymarket is exploring with its distributor Frontline, such as printing only a proportion of the total run of a magazine and then printing the rest later when required. There are many computations to this though. Another alternative is to print the total run length but only bind 50%, for example.

These models require a level of sophistication throughout the operation that King is uncertain exists currently however. Supermarket staff themselves might not understand what is being asked of them, he points out, with orders going astray or being re-ordered by mistake.

“It could take two years to educate people to do this, coupled with the fact that there’s a high staff turnover in supermarkets. It requires a level of sophistication from us and also a bigger one from supermarkets. Magazines also have a very small profile in supermarkets.”