Resource preservation

Cooperation with suppliers in the papermaking and printing stages

Paper is a key raw material for magazines. When purchasing paper we look into the efforts made by suppliers to reduce environmental impact, examining their efforts in terms of the five practices below, which are of particular importance in the thinking of the Recruit Group. All companies are making full efforts, but we intend to continue working together with our partners to further reduce their environmental footprint.

Important practices for the Recruit Group

1. Improving the paper manufacturing process

   • Eco-friendly materials procurement
   • Reduction in substances of concern, including CO₂ and waste materials
   • Energy-saving, efficient manufacturing processes

2. Other efforts

   • Protection and growth of forest resources, a major raw material
   • Development and spread of green products

Science of distribution

"Placing a large quantity of free magazines in a rack doesn't always increase the number of copies taken away. Necessary information needs to be optimally delivered to the people who need it. Distributing the appropriate number of copies contributes to Recruit Group's business, and is also useful as a resource preservation measure.
Recruit Group is conducting research on projects for improving distribution efficiency to reduce wasteful distribution, which has resulted in improving its accuracy. We call the ratio of the number of copies actually taken away to the number of copies placed in the rack the "takeaway ratio." The basis of improving the take away ratio is to plan the appropriate number of copies to be printed by determining how many copies are likely to be take away as a whole. In addition, Recruit Group takes measures by analyzing the probability of the number of copies to be taken away from every single rack across the country, and devises a plan for the number of copies to be delivered and the delivery method for each of the rack types and layers. And recently, we also use AI to improve the accuracy.

Recycling

Recruit Group also thoroughly collects and manages the remaindered free magazines in racks (remaindered copies). For resulting remaindered magazines, after the number of copies is reported by drivers in charge, most of them are collected by used paper companies and then delivered to paper-manufacturing companies. With such processes of recycling, the paper is recycled to cardboard and so on.

Use of soy ink and hot melt

When printing information magazines, we promote the use of environmentally-friendly inks and printing. Recruit Group uses environmentally-friendly "soy ink" in printing for 100% of the paper media periodically issued (except for annual magazines as well as covers, postcards, separate volumes, appendices, etc., and gravure printed parts). Soy ink generates fewer volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are air pollutants, than ordinary inks do. In addition, we use "hardly fragmented hot melt (a kind of adhesive)," which is suitable for recycling, in binding for 98.5% of regularly issued paper media using perfect binding.

Thorough trash separation and recycling