Doesn’t it drive you nuts when you go to read your favorite magazine and as soon as you pick it up all those annoying subscription cards fall out! Not just one card and not just two cards, but often three or four. What is the point? We get it magazine publishers - you want us to subscribe, but wouldn’t one card suffice? Do you really need to bombard us with all that extra paper? The amount of paper used for subscription cards is one thing - the amount of paper used for the magazines themselves is something else entirely. Think about how many magazines are published, printed and distributed over the course of a year (each with those bothersome cards). That is a huge amount of paper.
In the very first SGI, my mom talked about how she had made it her goal to reduce the amount of plastic bags she brought home from the grocery store. Well, my goal is to reduce the amount of paper I bring into the home. Here’s how we can all do it:
Subscribe to your magazines online. I don’t mean just order them online, I mean subscribe to them online and read them online.
Canadian House & Home Magazine offers a digital edition at $24.95 CAD for a 1 year Canadian subscription. Their printed edition is $29.95 CAD for a 1 year Canadian subscription. Saving money is always good incentive - saving paper is even better.
Check your magazines to see if they are offered in digital editions. If not, there is Zinio, a company who offers online subscriptions to 100’s of magazines in digital form.
Not ready to give up your hard copies? Then at least send a quick ‘digital’ note to the various subscription services departments for your magazines and express your thoughts about the number of unnecessary subscription card inserts.
Change can only come if we speak up and take action.
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