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Roy Greenslade
Hong Kong elderly groups make money from collecting free newspapers, selling them for recycling
HONG KONG (Guardian UK), April 29, 2008:
I'm in Hong Kong airport, en route to Australia, and by coincidence discover an intriguing story about the state of the newspaper industry here, thanks to a correspondent who pointed me to zonaeuropa It appears that the price of paper here - including, crucially, recycled paper - has been rising rapidly.
So groups of poorer elderly people have discovered a neat way to make money. They are collected reams of the 1.4m copies of the four free papers published every day and selling them to recycling plants Instead of queuing for free rice handed by charities, they arrive at dawn to line up at the distribution points for the free newspapers.
Sometimes, they ask passers-by to procure copies for them. A reporter discovered that three out of ten copies are currently falling into the hands of this army of newspaper collectors. Most of these are taken to recycling centres without ever being opened.
At one distribution point, the Olympic MTR train station near the old district of Tai Kok Tsui, the reporter saw more than 100 senior citizens holding ropes, bags and carts during their mad chase for newspapers.
Each newspaper fetches 13 cents - just under 1p sterling - at the recycling centre. It isn't much, but a stack of 10 papers weighs about one kilogram and fetches about 10p. But so rapid is the price of recycled paper increasing, up 30% in a year, that the manager of a recycle centre manger says some competitors have already raised the price for returned newspapers by more than 10%.
He said: "The centres make enough money and the grandpas and grandmas are happy too." But what about the advertisers? Are thery not concerned about the fact that the distribution figures for the free titles do not reflect the scale of genuine readership?
Incidentally, has anyone thought of this in London? How much would 100 copies of thelondonpaper and London Lite fetch, for example?
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
