Green America's plan to decrease production cost, while going even greener

[Keaty Gross]

The economic downturn and increasing paper prices are hitting publications with small to medium size press-runs especially hard, but tough times can also encourage thrift and innovation. Publications on a tight budget can opt for lighter bsw, reducing trim size and improving newsstand efficiency to reduce paper volume, but these changes still only get you so far.

Green America's Publication Director, Dennis Greenia, plans to talk with other magazines who use similar paper to see if they can create greater volume purchases and further reduce paper costs. Here’s his story of how the Green American (formerly the Co-op America Quarterly) continues to make better paper choices even in this rough economic climate.

How have Green America’s recycled paper choices saved you money?

Green America has been printing our publications on recycled paper for decades. Our membership magazine, the Green American used to be printed on a cold set web press using 50 lb offset recycled sheet that was 100% post-consumer content. In 2002, to save money on the cost of printing we began buying our paper in bulk and storing it with our printer. This saved us a considerable amount on our production costs.

In late 2003 we decided to upgrade the look of our magazine to a coated stock and 4-color printing throughout. Working with our paper vendor, New Leaf Paper, we were able to find a stock that maintained our strict environmental requirements and still kept our costs within budget—in fact we were able to upgrade the look of our publication with only a very slight increase to production costs. We used a 47.3 lb Cyclus matte finish stock which we bought in bulk from the mill through New Leaf.

To purchase our paper in bulk and take advantage of the savings we had to plan ahead. First, we had to work closely with our printer (Ripon Community Printers of Ripon, WI). They needed to agree to store the paper and let us know how much paper we would require to print our planned publications. Next we had to get our printer and New Leaf Paper working together to ensure that our paper order would be made and delivered to our printer’s specs. Then we had to order our paper by the truckload or shipping container (roughly 40,000 lbs). The details were worked out and buying paper in bulk has been a great benefit to our bottom-line ever since.

Why are you thinking of switching?

Over the last two years paper prices have been rising, and while buying in bulk is still saving us money, our costs per hundred-weight have increased by more than $12 since late 2007. Green America is a nonprofit and as Publication Director I am tasked with controlling costs. While we love the Cyclus sheet it was time to shop around. Once again, we turned to New Leaf Paper. They presented us with a number of options to meet our needs, including some strategies for a negotiating a better price if we choose to stay with the Cyclus paper. Of the options we were presented, the 45 lb My Connection stock from Myllykoski is the front runner.

Why Myllykoski?

It is a great looking sheet and from the samples we’ve seen it prints beautifully. The paper is made in a mill just outside of Chicago and we will save money on shipping to our printer in Wisconsin. Reducing the distance from mill to printer will also shrink the carbon footprint of our production process—an equally important goal of our organization and another good reason to make the switch.

What challenges do you foresee?

We have been buying our paper in bulk for some time now and we do not anticipate any major problems. We have switched stocks before. Our printer will need test the Myllykoski paper and ensure that it will run smoothly on their presses. They will also need to let us know the roll widths we’ll need to print our planned page counts and other specs. New Leaf Paper will need to work with the mill, our printer and us to ensure that an order is made and delivered to meet the needs of our production schedule. We have done these steps with New Leaf and our printer before and we expect the transition to a new stock to be smooth and event free.

What other ideas do you have to further reduce or minimize your cost of production?

The increasing cost of paper is a challenge for every magazine publisher—especially publications with small to medium size press-runs. At Green America, we have controlled some of those increases through leveraging our purchasing power when we buy our paper in bulk. Depending on page counts and special publications we use between 60,000 and 80,000 lbs of our magazine paper stock per year. New Leaf paper has helped us use our bulk paper demand to get us a lower price than we would pay if purchasing our paper with each press-run.

The only way to further reduce our costs would be to join with other publishers in a buying cooperative—a Better Paper Buying Club if you will—to increase the amount of paper purchased annually from a given mill. Exploring the possibilities of how to create such a buying cooperative is a conversation I intend to have on the Better Networking forum.