Photo: Sigmund on Unsplash.com

By Laura Durenberger-Grunow - Boreal Community Media - November 13, 2025

Last week, Cook County Land Services announced that magazines would no longer be accepted at the Cook County Recycling Center in Grand Marais. The reason is due to the absence of viable markets for recycled magazines at this time. 

Land Services suggested that community members could hold on to their magazines "in the hope that recycling markets will reopen in the near future." Additionally, magazines can be reused, repurposed, thrown away, or residents can unsubscribe or cancel subscriptions to catalogs or magazines they no longer wish to receive. Magazines can also possibly be donated. 

Boreal Community Media reached out to many entities commonly recommended for donating magazines, including local medical organizations, thrift stores, the library, local schools, senior centers, and more. Boreal either didn't hear back or received a response that the individual organization couldn't regularly accommodate a potentially high number of magazine donations. 

Some other options are to reuse them for crafts or upcycling (Pinterest or Google has a variety of ideas), offer them to others through local community Facebook sell-and-swap groups, or go digital via the Libby app, which you can utilize with a library card. Additionally, the Grand Marais Public Library has current, physical copies of many popular magazines available for reading. 

The recent inability of local facilities to accept coated paper, such as magazines, is not simply a northern Minnesota challenge. It is partly due to shifts in global trade policy, economic challenges in processing it, and a lack of demand. Historically, coated paper, which contains heavy inks and clay fillers, has been a low-value commodity. 

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), nondurable goods made of paper (which includes magazines) had a "recycling rate of 43.1%, significantly lower than corrugated boxes at 96.5%." The low recycling rate made it difficult to find domestic end markets, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA). Costs were often offset by shipping the material to overseas markets with lower operating expenses. 

This changed in 2018 with China's National Sword policy, which banned imports of unsorted mixed paper and imposed strict contamination limits on sorted mixed paper that proved difficult and costly for most U.S. single-stream facilities to meet, according to the US International Trade Commission (USITC). 

The National Sword policy also highlighted quality issues in single-stream recycling, popular in many U.S. municipalities. If the U.S. wanted to meet the contamination limits to allow China to accept imported, sorted, and mixed paper, recyclers would need to invest in new equipment, and, according to a University at Buffalo study, sorting lines could slow by up to 40%. The change resulted in many recyclers having to pay for disposal, which was unsustainable. According to the MPCA, "Without these end markets, we do not have recycling."