Take your paper with you

As usual when the public benefits from something free there’s always a bunch of killjoys just around the corner waiting to complain about it. This time its green campaigners having a whine about the free newspapers such as Metro, LondonLite and the londonpaper that are handed out at most of the central Underground stations.

A group called Project Freesheet have been trawling the Tube lines looking for free papers left by commuters. No surprise they’ve found some because that’s how people use these papers, they’re short digests of news, sports and entertainment and handy to browse through for a few minutes on a train. Sit on any Tube for 20 or 30 minutes and you’ll see three or four passengers pick up one of these papers, flick through it, get to their stop and leave it on the seat for the next person. On a busy train it’ll be picked up immediately. If there are some left on trains at the end of the day it shouldn’t be that difficult for London Underground to have recycling bins at their Tube depots when the trains get cleaned.