The Week Junior’s editor-in-chief, Anna Bassi, explains why your magazine will be delivered unwrapped from now on.
"If you are a UK subscriber to The Week Junior, you may have noticed something different about this week’s magazine. We hope you will join us in celebrating our very first plastic-free issue, delivered to your door unwrapped and ready to read.
Since it launched in November 2015, The Week Junior has featured at least 100 stories about plastic pollution, a number of which have also been the focus of our front cover. When David Attenborough’s Blue Planet 2 series was broadcast in 2017, the dangers of plastic in the environment – and particularly in the oceans – became impossible to ignore. When the magazine included a debate on whether plastic packaging should be banned, a majority of our readers agreed that it had to happen.
Until this week, The Week Junior was delivered to subscribers in a recyclable polywrap to protect it. However, many of our readers and their families have told us that it is not always possible to dispose of the wrapper responsibly because some local councils don’t recycle that particular material. We’ve received countless messages from readers asking us to find a more environmentally friendly way to deliver their magazine.
So, along with lots of other people at Dennis – the company that publishes The Week Junior – we set about investigating what would be the best alternative to our recyclable wrapper. We considered compostable wrappers and paper envelopes, but in the end we decided to try something different: we’ve chosen to deliver the magazine to our readers with no wrapper at all. We tested the idea on 4,500 subscribers by sending them unwrapped issues. We asked them to tell us whether their copy arrived intact and whether they’d be happy to have it delivered unwrapped, even if that meant a small risk of the paper being wrinkled or ripped.
We had hundreds of responses and I am very happy to say that the answer was overwhelmingly “YES!”, so that is what we are going to do from now on. On behalf of The Week Junior team, I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to let us know what they thought of the trial – you have all played an important part in helping us to make this change."
The Week Junior is currently delivered to over 97,000 homes every week, so removing the wrapper means we’ll reduce plastic waste by more than three million wrappers a year. That’s at least 10 tonnes of plastic that will no longer be at risk of polluting the environment. It’s a brilliantly simple solution that will definitely make a difference.
Want to know how you and your family can make a difference? Download our poster - 10 challenges to help fight plastic pollution.
DID YOU KNOW? The Week Junior is printed on FSC certified paper. This means that the wood used to make the paper comes from forests that are managed responsibly. Find out more at fsc-uk.org