Editor-in-chief Katharine Viner announced the move via Twitter on Friday. The media group is using compostable wrap made from potato starch by Alfaplas in Hereford, with wrapping of the supplements pack taking place RMS in Rainham and at YM Chantry in Wakefield, which prints Review, The Guide and Feast. Weekend magazine is gravure printed on the continent at Roto Smeets and then shipped to the UK.
Copies of the newspaper circulated in East Anglia, London and the parts of the South East have switched first, and Viner said the compostable wrap would “rolling out to the rest of the UK soon”.
As well as information explaining how to dispose of the wrap by composting it, the pack featured a promotional message from ethical cleaning products firm Ecover, which also had a cover wrap on Weekend magazine.
From tomorrow, for the first time, the Guardian’s Saturday magazines will be wrapped in a compostable wrapping derived from potato starch, replacing the current plastic wrapping. Starting with London, Essex, Norfolk, Kent, Herts & Suffolk, rolling out to the rest of the UK soon pic.twitter.com/Qy7m4Y6d2B
— Katharine Viner (@KathViner) January 11, 2019
The Guardian’s Saturday edition has an average circulation of just over 257,000.
The newspaper switched to tabloid format a year ago, and outsourced printing to Trinity Mirror (now Reach) at the same time.
The move comes as a number of major newspaper and magazine publishers seek to find alternatives to single-use plastics, with the RHS confirming its plans to switch to paper wrap last week.
