Pitney Bowes does not have a significant presence in the mass saturation marketing mail business, except for a small portion of our Mail Services business that consolidates advertising mail from multiple customers and gets it to its destination faster and less expensively. We have much more of a stake in creating high-value mail. Our software businesses eliminate undeliverable and duplicative mail. Our Marketing Services businesses try to direct customers to do better targeting and data analysis to eliminate mailings to people who are unlikely to respond to them. Our mailing technology businesses give mailers who want to do targeted mail the tools to get it done.

All that being said, the postal rate structures actually encourage mass marketing mail, through no fault of the U.S. Postal Service. Bulk mail pricing is supposed to be matched to costs, which means that mail sent to every address in a community gets lower rates and lower overall costs than mail that is sent to 80% of the addresses. Thus, if a mailer were to cull out the recipients who might not want to receive a mailing, the mailer is penalized because the cost of sorting the mail and separating out the mail that is required to be suppressed is adding to the price of postage. We need a “green” rate that rewards selectively and penalizes mass, duplicative mailings, and we are working with the industry to give the Postal Service the operating freedom to put such a rate into effect. That will take some advocacy and some regulatory analysis, but there is a lot of momentum to getting this done.

Pitney Bowes is a strong believer in environmental stewardship and sustainability:

• Throughout our history, we have rented and leased equipment to customers, kept it in use as long as possible, and recovered it at the end of its useful life for proper disposition.
• Since 1979, we have provided a business service that obviates wasteful driving to and from post offices to transact business, through our Postage-by-Phone system.
• We have lobbied successfully for changes in postal regulations that have minimized wasteful shipments of postage meters back and forth from our customers, and have reduced resource consumption by changing features through software, rather than add-on parts and components to our machines.
• We have actively focused on reduced service calls, both by increased product reliability, and by solving service issues over the telephone.
• We have consolidated mail for the Postal Service and avoided significant resource consumption in moving mail inefficiently through the postal system.
• During my tenure as General Counsel, we reduced our hazardous emissions by 90% and took them to below reportable quantities.

Today, we are working actively with such organizations as The Rainforest Alliance, the World Environmental Fund, and the Forestry Stewardship Council to focus on reducing the environmental footprint of mail.

Most importantly, we support the principle that well-informed consumers should have the ability to make very granular choices as to what they want and don’t want to receive in the mail. For example, if you were to change your residence, we produce a move update service, both in paper form and online, that allows you to decide what catalogs you no longer want to receive. The online version also allows you to suppress magazine mailings to you.

Like you, I grew up with a set of values that caused me to live well below my means, and I believe that wastefulness has a moral dimension to it. I have tried during my tenure to get Pitney Bowes’ example of frugality and sustainability more broadly based in our industry. While I am pleased at our progress, much remains to be done.

I believe that both systemic changes and personal sacrifice are important. I sincerely admire what you have done with the Pitney Bowes workspaces. I think changes like that are of tremendous value. At the same time, my husband and I actually have chosen to live a simpler and lower impact life. Our household greenhouse gas emissions are only 30-50 percent of the American average (depending on which calculator I use–it’s admittedly quite complex to figure). It doesn’t feel like a sacrifice, though. It feels like a healthier, saner, more grounded, and more secure way to live. Maybe that’s the key, in both the workplace and the home. If it feels easy, it is.

There’s a lot more I could say about my unhappy experiences with the DMA, both recently and as far back as the 90s. I could elaborate at length, as well, about my reasons for disliking catalogs even from places where I am already a loyal customer. I am now mostly self-directed as a consumer and am part of a segment who should probably not be marketed to, period, because it’s a waste of resources and an ongoing source of aggravation and misunderstanding for all parties. It seems to me like one of the most direct ways to handle this situation would be some sort of integration of the solutions provided by Pitney Bowes and of the third party services (one in particular) now heavily favored by consumers.

If you’ve already ruled out that possibility (I don’t want to make any assumptions, but because of your repeated recommendations for the DMA, it sort of sounds like you are not open to any other service), I would be most interested to hear what Pitney Bowes offers to marketers to help them discover and suppress mailings to people like me. We’re the people who used to like catalogs but no enjoy them, people who have become committed online shoppers and would feel no motivation to drive to a retail store just because a catalog has not arrived. (I do shop at some retail stores, for what it’s worth, but I walk.)

Safe travels.

Those were all nice ideas described in your original entry above. It’s nifty that you were able to implement those changes at Pitney Bowes.

Drive less, recycle, decline unwanted junk mail — each of these are ways individuals can make a positive difference today.

Don’t underestimate the appeal of sacrifice and conservation — humans thrive with a sense of purpose.

If someone does not want to receive unsolicited catalogs, go to the DMA web site at http://www.the-dma.org/index.php