Papers in Plastic

When I was a kid, the local newspaper was always delivered by some physically active neighbourhood kid on foot or riding a bike. The paper was sometimes rolled up with a rubber band and delivered to the door or darn close to it. Now it’s in these fiendish  plastic bags delivered by poorly-paid middle to late aged adult drivers speeding along the street tossing the paper and its plastic somewhere nearby – in the gutter, in the garden, on the road or, if I’m lucky,  in my driveway. Now what comes to my mind every delivery day is the bible: Matthew 7:7 “Seek and you will find” … your newspaper, if you are lucky, my child.

These single use plastic bags are so worthless and thin that they usually tear on impact and are no barrier to the damp. Stories abound of bungled deliveries piling up on kerbsides near holiday homes in many coastal towns or of torn bags with their soggy contents sitting in the drain at the end of a driveway. These plastic bags and their now pulped contents clog gutters or, even worse, end up in our waterways. The plastic bags that make it to the bin and their final resting place, the landfill, seem to breed like rabbits, contaminating our soil and sometimes taking flight with the wind and escaping to nearby bushland.

One of our local newspapers, Noosa News, claims a circulation of 24,308. It’s delivered twice weekly so that’s nearly 50,000 of them. Its rival Noosa Today states a weekly circulation of 23,000, so we’re talking nearly 75,000 newspapers a week. If only half are delivered in plastic, that’s about 200,000 single use plastic bags a year merely for convenience of home delivery and a 15-minute read if your eyes were slow to get functioning that morning. And this unsustainable practice doesn’t even take into account the greenhouse gas emissions from the delivery vehicles. To be fair, Noosa News and Noosa Today are distributed on racks at some local shopping centres. But that’s only in the bigger coastal towns and is a relatively minor form of distribution.

With the impending ban on single use plastic shopping bags on 1 July (a number of Noosa supermarkets have got in early), what can our newspaper companies do to join this progressive trend and stop the archaic and unsustainable practice of home delivery? On a recent trip to the US, I encountered towns that have a very simple solution. For over 20 years, many local newspapers have stopped home delivery of free newspapers and established key distribution locations.

These newspapers utilise the old-fashioned weather proof newspaper boxes and they’re situated outdoors at shopping centres, supermarkets, convenience stores and servos for easy access to readers. And some are also distributed on wire racks inside shops. Special deliveries are made to nursing homes and retirement communities. It’s quite a simple system to target readers rather than the current indiscriminate delivery of newspapers often left unread in their plastic sheaths.

Noosa shoppers could easily pick up their favourite local newspaper of their own volition and, on the way home, place it in their reusable shopping bag. So what’s stopping our local newspaper companies using their latent creativity to come up with some effective solutions that will maintain their readership, keep their product dry and do their bit towards protecting our environment?

And here’s an idea for free bin liners?

After 1 July, the locally read rags will double up as an ideal free bin liner for the thrifty resident shopper.

Here is a simple news paper fold to make a bin liner from instructables