“Do Not Mail” Legislation and “Junk” Environmentalism
It has become fashionable to trash direct marketing mail in the media. Not surprisingly, reporters and editors in the print media, which compete with advertising mail, coined the phrase “junk mail,” and so-called environmentalists have argued that paper-based letter mail is environmentally unfriendly because of the consumption of paper, ink, and energy. (As an aside, I find that these reporters and editors are militantly ignorant about the role direct mail plays in enabling them to have jobs, since the magazines go through the mail, direct mail is used to solicit subscribers, and first-class mail is the way bills and statements get to those subscribers.) In fact, one coalition has recruited an articulate and highly-respected actor, Matt Damon, who recently appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show and passionately argued for the banning of “junk mail.” I understand his frustration and the frustration of others with unwanted mail, but the remedy of banning all unsolicited marketing mail is misguided.
Don’t get me wrong. I think low-quality mass marketing mail diminishes the value of the mailstream. I do not like having to throw out 90+% of what I receive every day, especially duplicates of catalogs I have no desire to get in the first place.
I also recognize that people who try and fail to get off a mailing list have a right to be angry.
But let’s “see a different game” here:
- Why don’t the environmentalists who want to preserve trees talk to the environmentalists who care about clean air? When people stop shopping by catalog and, instead, go to a retail store to buy the same item the air pollution their car creates is far worse for the environment than the increasingly recyclable paper that makes up their catalog. One of the problems with many environmentalists is that they congratulate themselves for having reduced a particular environmental hazard without asking whether their success has created an even bigger hazard. The reality is that if you took all the paper from mail out of all of the landfills in America, the volume of these landfills would be reduced by only 2.5%, but the additional traffic congestion caused by all those vehicle trips contributes to asthma and an increasing epidemic of serious respiratory conditions, especially for children. If you do not believe people who stop shopping by catalog will drive to retail stores, ask the state sales tax officials who complain that catalog and online shopping are replacing in-state retail shopping that generates sales tax revenues.
- Some environmentalists will say that everything should be e-mailed. That’s great for the sender, but it stinks for the recipient, and it’s also much more likely than many people realize to have a bad environmental impact. Have you ever received a 50-page attachment to an e-mail? If you want to read it, you will print it, and when you do, you have likely accounted for far more greenhouse gas emissions than if it had been printed by a sender in a production mail shop. Printing e-mails is more common than most environmentalists imagine. Some experts estimate that 40-60% of all e-mails get printed by recipients. Xerox Corporation recently did a study that showed that the average office worker prints 1200 pages of e-mails every month that he or she reads and throws away after reading. Are we better off with locally-printed e-mails and a lower recycling rate on desktop print cartridges than we are with centrally-produced printed material and more sophisticated recycling systems? Someone needs to do objective research on this.
- Besides, who ever got the idea that pure electronic messages create no greenhouse gasses. Have you ever been to a data center where all those spam e-mails are transmitted and received? The electricity to run the computers and the air-conditioners to cool the data centers and the water coolants use up huge amounts of energy, not to mention the huge amount of wastewater generated.
- In fact, I would suggest that many processes that are face-to-face and involve a round-trip in an automobile should be converted to mail delivery-based processes. Why shouldn’t everyone vote by mail, as they do in Washington and Oregon? Why should anyone ever have to register a motor vehicle at a motor vehicle bureau to which they have to drive? Why should people wait at toll plazas and spew horrible gasses into the air when we could have completely automated toll systems? Why do we need policemen to catch some speeders with their engines idling while the policeman writes a ticket when photo systems can catch all traffic violators and send them a traffic ticket in the mail? Why should a frail elderly person or their caregiver have to pick up a prescription at a pharmacy when the pharmacy could have it delivered?
But there’s another big issue at stake here. Direct mail is a low-cost medium that enables many job-creating businesses of all sizes to survive. The mass saturation mail we do not like in our mailbox gets enough responses from others that marketers keep generating it. Even web-based businesses need to connect with prospects through the mail to get them to the web site. What happens to the Americans who lose their jobs when a direct mail or catalog operation goes out of business? I can tell you that many of the people who work in our industry are working-class Americans who would drop down into a much more challenged socio-economic environment if they did not have these jobs. I also believe that the small businesses which grow by using the mail would employ fewer people as well if they could not use the mail to reach a broader customer base.
I’m not an apologist for the Postal Service or for the low-quality mail that has led to these initiatives. It bothers me that the Postal Service does not penalize those marketing mailers who make no effort to eliminate badly addressed mail or duplicate mailings that come into the same household. It also bothers me that some credit card solicitors send multiple mailings to the same person. I am particularly offended when I hear stories about marketers who keep sending mail to people they have been informed have died. There are solutions to these problems. The people who truly mail “junk” should pay far more for postage than the mailers who invest in higher quality, better-addressed, better-targeted mail.
However, think of screening mail like having a remote control device for a TV set. We all want the ability to change channels, and, if we have young children, to be able to block specific channels, while continuing to access others. Imagine if there were a few consistently bad channels, and some zealots advocated that everyone should get a remote control with only an on/off switch that, once used to turn off the TV, could not turn it back on without great difficulty. We have TiVo and VCRs because we know that some of what is on TV is content we want to receive. Likewise, some of the marketing mail every one of us gets is something we would want.
What we most need is a workable registry that mailers would be required to check every time they want to do a mailing. You should be able to record your preferences in such a way that you could choose not to continue to receive certain items, to receive them less or more frequently, or to receive similar items. The preference service could even be a vehicle for recipients to say that they like receiving the notification about a particular product or service, but do not like the tone or style of the message. For example, I would like to tell any of the political groups which send me direct mail not to try to fool me into believing that it is an official communication, when it is a marketing solicitation.
Why mass marketers cannot figure out how to execute on a business case to eliminate the 99% of the direct mail that every recipient does not want when they get it is beyond me. Moreover, those mailers who fail to access the registry or to abide by recipient preferences should pay more to mail than those who access the registry and adhere to the preferences of the recipients.
In fact, why can’t a registry prompt people with a particular interest to look for catalogs or vendors they might want, as well as what they do not want, or ask about their preferences relative to how they want communication to reach them in the future? Amazon.com does this very well with the suggestions on other books. A preference service would be far more palatable to marketers if it gave them a roadmap as to what recipients want, as well as what they do not want.
But my biggest problem, having been an environmental advocate who has actually taken concrete actions to improve air, water, and landfills, is the sloppiness of the conventional thinking that passes for environmentalism.
For example, I have visited many coffee shops, and I have observed a lot of well-meaning, so-called “environmentally-friendly” approaches to the container for the coffee. Some shops serve coffee only in ceramic cups because they do not want to add paper or plastic to landfills. However, they have no conception of the greenhouse gasses emitted by the electricity generated to heat the dishwasher that washes the cup, or the hazardous emissions from the cleaning solvents used in the dish-washing process, or the destruction of living things in the waterways where the heated wastewater goes.
Some shops serve coffee in paper cups because they think plastic is bad for the environment, but, as we discussed above, paper consumption increases the cutting down of trees, and consumes energy. Plastics that are not recycled stay in landfills forever.
My point is that, as long as we consume resources, we will have some degree of environmental hazards unless we invest significantly more in reducing resource consumption, re-using and recycling. As a society, we need the political will to put the tough choices on the table.
Most importantly, let’s have the appropriate degree of intellectual rigor on these very difficult subjects.
June 20th, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Hello Mike:
There are many states like ours for example: http://phillupdbag.com/who_is_phillup.php
that have Recycle “Junk Mail” programs. This is a good approach instead of “banning” mail. Of course, many will argue that many junk mail pieces cannot be recycled effectively because of special inks and coatings used to make them colorful and glossy. This process does have its con’s. In order to recycle, you will need to have the mail collected, transport it to the recycling facility, make it into a new product and market that product that requires major energy resources hence, environmental repercussions, as you already pointed out.
Mike, you made some very good points and although this topic may seem to be a ‘double-edge-sword’, I believe with persistence, education and commonsense, eventually society as a whole will prevail.
~PM
June 27th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
The Bethel, Connecticut transfer center (dump) now has a bin for the recycling of unwanted mail (as well as newspapers, paper bags, cardboard, metal, glass, and plastic). A simple way to save money on each visit (about 11 cents a pound these days) and to keep unwanted mail out of the landfill.
I also called the 50 catalog companies mailing me unwanted catalogs and asked to me removed from their lists; that significantly reduced my unwanted mail. They should have been reviewing their order records and noticing that I never placed orders with them.
July 11th, 2007 at 1:44 pm
You’ve found a real gem of truth in saying, “One of the problems with many environmentalists is that they congratulate themselves for having reduced a particular environmental hazard without asking whether their success has created an even bigger hazard.”
One doesn’t need to look very far to find more examples of this principle in action:
Compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) initially appear to be environmentally friendly based on their lower consumption of electricity, but they drastically increase hazardous exposure to mercury through breakage or disposal in landfills. We’re trading one problem for another problem that may be worse than the first.
Ethanol seems “green” at first blush because it is a renewable source of energy that could potentially free us from dependency on fossil fuels, but this conveniently overlooks the fact that using it actually produces more air pollution than gasoline and moreover that it provides 34% less energy per gallon. Yet again, we’re failing to think through the full impact of proposed changes.
What is it that causes such a failure in analytical thinking? It would seem to be a human tendency towards oversimplification. Most likely it is this tendency that inspired the old words of wisdom, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
July 11th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
To David Glowny:
David,
I could not agree with you more about the narrow-gauged focus of many well-meaning environmentalists. Unfortunately, I just think that many people do not have the intellectual discipline or curiosity to think through the unintended consequences of what they advocate. I also think that many people who work for a particular cause and get rewarded on a narrow set of objectives have an additional financial or even psychic interest in promoting a narrower agenda.
- mike
July 12th, 2007 at 9:01 am
Yes, it amazes me that many environmentalists are promoting e-mail as a better alternative to traditional mail. We know that PCs use energy, even when idling. We know that paper consumption has increased significantly in the electronic age. And we also know that toner cartridges (often toxic) are being dumped in landfill. It would be advantageous, however, if there was a comparison undertaken to actually compare the carbon footprint of a direct mail piece generated in bulk by a printing company and distributed in the post versus the 40% – 60% of recipients (I think that was the figure quoted) who print emailed communications out on their own printers. Given the number of professional printing companies that are now opting for recycled paper and less harmful inks, I’m sure the impact to the environment would be greater for communications sent by email – especially with regard to large documents.
July 12th, 2007 at 9:55 am
Mike,
First off, kudos to you on the blog. Great thoughts and perspective – very even handed in my opinion. Love the balance between corporate and social citizen.
Excellent points on the environment. As a 20+ year mailing industry veteran and a moderate environmentalist, I would add one additional point to this thread. Lost in this discourse is the fact that many do not understand that we would prefer to mail less. It has long been an irritant to me and others that a 1-2% response rate is success, but this is the reality of our industry financial metrics. In any other walk of life it is likely failure. We apply diligent testing, modeling, segmentation and countless other dollar consuming efforts in an attempt to mail less and preserve sales.
I believe far too often the common public perception is that we want to “postal spam” the world, when the true reality is that mail has its own built in limiting factors in the cost of printing, postage and in the case of prospecting, the data itself.
Not only is new thinking needed on the part of the mail industry on how to reduce mail without sacrificing the sales that power a huge economic engine (and more paychecks than most realize) but also better understanding on the environmentalist side of the pitch as to what our truest intentions and challenges are.
Pat
July 14th, 2007 at 11:27 am
For Pat Sabatino:
Pat,
I could not agree more with your sentiments on saturation mailings that have very small response rates. To some degree, mailers do this out of habit, but there are also other quirks in postal rating systems. For example, saturation mailings that go to every address in a ZIP code are significantly less expensive per piece than mailings that delete over 10% of the addresses in a ZIP code. Under the old postal law, the U.S. Postal Service is required to price each offering based primarily on cost. Since it is cheaper for a letter carrier to deliver to every address than to take additional time sorting out addresses, the saturation mailing is priced at a lower rate per piece to reflect the lower processing and delivery cost, so many mailers either mail to every address in a ZIP code using a saturation mailing offering or they completely eliminate a ZIP code from their mailing, which, of course, reduces mail volumes.
Under the new law, the Postal Regulatory Commission has the potential to allow the Postal Service to take environmental issues into effect, so we need to petition them to do this as they formulate the new rate-setting rules.
There are other things we need to get mailers to do:
• The Postal Service is reluctant to take on large direct marketers who fail to use state-of-the-art software to eliminate duplicates and mail with incorrect or out-of-date addresses. All of us need to get them to incent or penalize mailers to improve address quality.
• Many mailers do not access existing registries at all or often enough. For example, the Direct Marketing Association has a registry of deceased persons that obviously should be accessed to eliminate a wasted mail piece. Too few mailers use it.
• Mailers have the opportunity to collect more data on recipient preferences. For example, as part of the Imagitas, a Pitney Bowes subsidiary, Pitney Bowes-Imagitas does the fulfillment process for the Postal Service Move Update kit; we provide a catalog preference card for recipients. This enables the mailer to learn who will be interested in receiving its catalog. Too many catalog companies are reluctant to pay a very reasonable price to get a name of an individual who has actually self-declared that he or she wants a particular catalog. They prefer to spend less per name on a less targeted mass marketing list.
Old habits die hard in this industry, but if the industry does not police itself, government will step in and probably require an excessively onerous “Do Not Mail” registry.
- mike
July 20th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
DONT FORGET 16 TREES ONE TON OF PAPER
July 23rd, 2007 at 10:13 am
For Allan Smith:
Allan,
I am assuming that what you mean is that 16 trees must be cut to produce one ton of paper. That may or may not be true, but, by itself, it is a meaningless statistic. The questions that must be asked relative to resource consumption and paper, beyond that, are:
• When a paper company cuts down many trees to produce paper, what is the overall effect on the number of trees? The answer is that the U.S. has added more than 10 million acres of forest land in the last 20 years alone. Moreover, the forest products industry alone plants 1.7 million trees per day.
• I would also note that paper waste is a short-term landfill issue, which accounts for only about 2.5% of the total content of landfills. High-tech waste from discarded batteries, computers, cell phones, and lead-based chips are a much more serious problem, as is industrial waste.
• If you are referring to mail as a source of paper, then the question that needs to be asked is: does eliminating mail eliminate paper? The answer is generally no. In the office environment, we have ample data to support the fact that 40-60% of all e-mails get printed, and then destroyed after reading. At home as well, broader studies and surveys show that consumers print a significant percentage of e-mails they receive and want to read, and they print pages downloaded from web sites of interest to them. Think about accessing directions from MapQuest and other travel direction sites. Most people will print them, and take them in a car. This is actually worse for the environment than if the paper were printed centrally, because the percentage of paper, ink cartridges, and other consumables recycled from desktop printers, particularly in homes, is far lower than the recycling going on in central printing plants.
• Finally, the next question is: if people did not receive catalogs or direct mail, how would they shop? The answer is that many would drive to a retail store, which creates far more carbon footprint than the energy consumed in producing and distributing the individual pieces of mail.
By the way, in this environmental comparison, I have not calculated the horrific environmental impact of the data centers, computers, and other devices that get electronic messages from senders to recipients, but they are also significant.
My bottom-line comments are these:
• If you want to look at the environmental impact of a process or an item, look at the total picture, not just a small slice of it.
• When we suppress one communication or distribution methodology in the name of environmentalism, what is the environmental impact of what replaces it?
- mike