[buttmunch]

It looks like Vanity Fair doesn’t practice what it preaches when it comes to its upcoming “green issue.”

Due to hit newsstands in the second week of April, the celebrity glossy had dedicated its May issue to the environment, reportedly featuring eco-friendly stars like George Clooney and Leonardo DiCaprio on the cover, in-depth articles on topics such as global warming and printing the magazine on recycled paper.

Well, Vanity Fair has dropped the idea of using recycled paper in the issue.

“They were scrambling to do it but it was too short a time frame and they couldn’t make it happen,” says one insider.

The Conde Nast publication’s rivals at Hachette Filipacchi performed a little better - Elle’s green issue, which was edited by Laurie David (Larry David’s wife) and includes articles by Cameron Diaz, will include 10% recycled content.

So, when you pick up the May issue of VF and start reading the eco-friendly articles, don’t feel too smug about your increased environmental consciousness.

That single issue involved the destruction of thousands of trees and it was printed using chlorine and other chemicals. Specifically, that issue probably used up to 2,247 tons of pulp, and produced up to 4,331,757 pounds of greenhouse gases,13,413,922 gallons of wastewater, and 1,744,060 pounds of solid waste throughout the printing process.

That’s according to our calculation of VF’s monthly circulation times the weight of its paper and then inputting that tonnage into the Paper Calculator, which was developed by Environmental Defense to calculate the environmental impacts of printing.

A spokeswoman for Vanity Fair did not return calls for comment.

“We were excited to see that Elle and Vanity Fair would do at least one issue with recycled paper,” says Susan Kinsella, the executive editor of Conservatree, a San Francisco nonprofit that advocates for environmental paper. She started the Magazine Paper project about five years ago to encourage more publications to use recycled content.

Currently, only a few magazines use recycled content - including Body & Soul, Shape, Natural Health, Plenty, and Ranger Rick. In the past, magazine publishers have been skeptical that they can achieve the high-end look of their glossy pages using recycled content. “But the truth is that you can get high quality - look at National Geographic, their cover page is 10% post-consumer recycled content,” says Kinsella.

In general, newspapers have been much more receptive, using over 20% recycled content across the board. Some of this is due to the cheaper quality of newspaper stock and to laws passed in recent decades - in California, state law requires that 40% of newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee and the San Jose Mercury News use recycled content.

But the magazine industry is starting to adjust. In recent years, they have switched to different types of bleaching by using a chlorine derivative that produces less dioxin, cut back on some of the waste they’ve generated and started using lighter paper requiring less wood pulp.

“A number of magazines have been exploring using recycled content in their papers,” says Frank Locantore, director of the Magazine PAPER project at the nonprofit group Co-op America, who cites Time Inc.’s director of sustainability, David Refkin, as one of the few people in the magazine world who takes this issue seriously. “At this point, it’s an issue of cost, look, availability.”

muckraked.com

I found this very interesting. The profit motive stands tall, no matter what. It would have been great to see VF print on recycled paper, even if they had to jack up the price for this issue or maybe even just broke even. They would have made a far bigger point by doing that--and basked in the ensuing publicity--than by printing some article by green celebs.