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

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

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

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

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.”

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.

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