The Frontline Group, part of the Children’s Publishers Forum, has been named the winner of the Sustainable Print Excellence Award at the 2026 WAN-IFRA Print & Sustainability Awards.
The award recognises the Children’s Publisher Forum for delivering measurable environmental improvements and helping drive the transition to a more sustainable future for print and publishing.
The World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA), which presents the Print Sustainability Awards, is a global organisation that represents the world’s news publishers and media companies and hosted the World’s Printers Summit 2026 in Rotterdam earlier this month.
Duncan Shearer, client services director at Seymour Distribution and POC Ambassador, collected the award, and commented: “Receiving international recognition from such a respected industry body is very pleasing, as you can imagine.”
The award recognised the Children’s Publishers Forum, an industry-wide initiative chaired by Frontline and founded in 2019 by leading children’s publishers including Immediate, DC Thomson, National Geographic Kids, Kennedy Publishing, and Story House Egmont. The Forum was created with a shared ambition to transform the sustainability of the children’s magazine sector through collaboration rather than competition.
The work has focused on reducing environmental impact while protecting the important role children’s magazines play in literacy and learning. Through a shared Sustainability Roadmap developed with RISE (Research Institutes of Sweden), and the PPA, the Forum has introduced industry-wide standards, eliminated and reduced problematic materials such as PVC and glitter, increased recycled content, expanded product reuse programmes and supported initiatives such as Recycle to Read with the support of Products of Change and Wastebusters.
The Forum has also been working hard to improve and amplify the value of covermounts and work with Fundamentally Children and use The Good Play Guide as an independent audit partner, assessing covermounted toys against agreed standards for durability, multi-use, sustainability, engagement, and their play and learning benefits. All participating publishers have now signed the roadmap and achieved 100% compliance with its standards.
“Sustainability is particularly important to Frontline because we sit at the heart of the magazine supply chain and have the ability to bring together publishers, retailers and suppliers to create change at scale. The Children’s Publishers Forum is a great example of the role we can play in helping an entire sector reduce its environmental footprint while protecting readership, literacy and long-term business resilience,” commented Duncan Shearer.
The Children’s Magazine Forum also won a POC Member Award in 2024 for Sustainable Development Goal 9 – Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.
