From One Liberal to Another, Shame on You: 10 Flaws in the Latest Do-Not-Mail Initiative

Flaw 5: Recycling
Before I go into an all-out assault on ForestEthics, let me attack my own message first. By now, some readers are thinking I’m unsympathetic to excessive waste, overflowing landfills and the like. Quite the contrary. Catalogs can and should be recycled. All of them.

While I’m hardly one to toot the Direct Marketing Association’s horn, it has done a noble job encouraging members to take an active role in its “Recycle Please” program, which urges catalogers to place a logo on their books and consumers to put their unwanted (or already used) catalogs into recycle bins for proper recycling. More on the DMA further down, and it’s not all quite as pretty.

On top of that, recycling agencies are stepping up more every day. In the community where I live, Westchester County in New York, we recently received a stern warning from our refuse collectors that we must separate our recyclables and clearly wrap our newspapers and catalogs. If we don’t, they won’t pick them up. BUT if that happens and we try to dump them in the trash, we’ll be fined. Certainly a good idea, and I’m sure that stiffer warnings lie ahead.

Flaw 6: Show Me the Money!
As one of only four people who asked questions of this group during that rather sudden March 11 teleconference (and actually, one of the other three was my colleague at Catalog Success, Senior Associate Editor Joe Keenan), I grilled ForestEthics’ Paglia on just where the money is coming from to support this initiative. He couldn’t have been more vague in his response: “It’s funded by individuals and foundations in the U.S. and beyond.”

So after the teleconference, I asked him (via e-mail) to be more specific: How much money is behind this effort, and who are the individuals and foundations providing it? “Like many things, this is a work in progress,” he replied. “I will say we have a many-year commitment to this campaign, and that it is quickly on its way to becoming the largest, most well-funded campaign we have ever run.”