VIDEO: The Green Publishing Initiative is turning old magazines into jewellery

How big an environmental problem are print magazines? (0:03)

There’s a big surplus of magazines obviously, magazines from as long as 10 years ago. Even the local magazines. We have many issues which are not sold at the end of the day, to the point where we’re even like saying ‘don’t read them, just recycle them’.

But eventually you need to take care of the environment, because where do those magazines go if people have finished reading them? This is what the project is really trying to aim at doing. But most importantly it’s to empower women to come up with this sort of business for the environment and also for their empowerment in their poor communities.  

What persuaded you to set up the Green Publishing Initiative? (0:47)

So at the time I’d go home for holidays and I’d find my mother busy cutting my magazine. We publish a magazine called the Ambassador magazine in Harare, so she was busy cutting it and making some beads. I just stood there thinking ‘OK, what is she doing?’ Eventually I saw that she was making a very nice product. That’s when it really hit us to say ok she can do these nice things. And she has a community of friends from her Church that were actually taught by some very good ladies to do this. So we’re just trying to grow this now, to help her and her friends to make a good business from this and eventually recycling these products. 

And how do you intend to collaborate with publishers? (1:32)

What we want publishers to do is to partner with us and say at Easter, you want to send out gifts to your readers, or your subscribers. So you can order as many as 10,000 depending on your print run – you can order as many as 10,000 small gifts to range from the bracelets with earrings, we can customise it can be even an opener and you send those out to your subscribers. We can even use your magazines, your flyers, your calendars, tell us who your printer is… So at the end of the day it’s really having you as a publisher being responsible for the environment number one, and also supporting some women that have found fascinations with your magazines… even if sometimes they don’t read them or fellows have made them Blippable, you never know the sky’s the limit.  

How will the publishers benefit? (2:22)

You know for a long time we’ve had different industries having some sort of a… well in Africa we call them NGOs… Non-Government organisations… if you ever thought of the magazine industry ever having a non profit organisation this would be the one, y’know cos we at the end of the day, we show the good side of the publisher. So it’s a very good initiative for any magazine publisher who’s still doing print.

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