Eco-friendly subscribers of National Geographic will be pleased to know that their magazine will arrive in a paper wrapper, instead of a plastic one, starting this month. This change will reportedly save more than 2.5 million single-use plastic bags every month.
National Geographic’s editor-in-chief, Susan Goldberg, announced yesterday that the move will affect subscribers in the UK, US and India and is part of the magazine’s new ‘Planet or Plastic’ campaign.
“It’s hard to get your head around the story of plastic. Can it really be true that half the plastic ever made was produced in the last 15 years?” Goldberg said in the announcement yesterday. She also has called for the rest of National Geographic’s international editions to follow suit by the end of 2019.
While magazines are recyclable, the plastic that they often come wrapped in is not good for the planet or the plastic pollution crisis. For those who subscribe to a different magazine or buy theirs in a shop, there is a way to make sure your plastic wrapper has as eco-friendly an afterlife as possible.
National recycling campaign group Recycle Now told HuffPost UK that if your magazine’s plastic wrapping is stretchy enough that you can poke a hole in it, you can recycle it.
The only thing is, this type of plastic is not part of our local recycling scheme’s capabilities. “The best way to recycle plastic magazine wrappers is at a local collection point, like at a supermarket where plastic bags are recycled,” Laura Copsey, a spokesperson for Recycle Now, told HuffPost UK.