Environmental Sustainability

Claims that have been made about direct mail’s impact on the environment have been uniformly negative, with a significant level of misinformation. In fact, the reality is that the mailing industry, through its investments in programs and initiatives to address and further reduce the environmental impact associated with all six lifecycle stages of letter mail, deserves some recognition for its efforts.

Office Depot will open its first Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Commercial Interiors (CI) registered store. The global provider of office products and services expects the Austin, Texas, store to be certified a few months after opening.

Best Buy said it also plans to invest in a centralized, ultrasonic humidification system, which it said with both save energy and provide a return on investment within a year.  The company will also focus on reducing fleet fuel use, tighter operational controls, reduced plug loads, and carbon offsets or renewable energy credits.

Pan American Develop-ment Foundation (PADF): This nonprofit organization that creates public-private partnerships to assist disadvantaged people in Latin America and the Caribbean has launched a print catalog of corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing opportunities in those regions. The 28-page book provides an overview of PADF projects that are well-suited for private-sector participation.

This week in the final part of our two-part coverage of a recent webinar from the Target Marketing and Printing Impressions Publishing Groups (sister publications of Catalog Success), Go ‘Green’ From the Inside Out: How to Develop a Corporate Environmental Sustainability Program, we continue our look at how baking flour cataloger King Arthur Flour has made environmental responsibility a priority. In particular, we’ll provide tips from Allison Furbish, media relations manager at King Arthur Flour, on how to help your business develop an environmental sustainability program. (For part 1, click here.) To support its environmental sustainability initiative, King Arthur Flour has partnered with a

As the pressure mounts for catalog/multichannel companies to become more environmentally friendly — the charge led in particular by environmental groups such as Catalog Choice — at least one cataloger has responded to the calls. In a recent webinar from the Target Marketing and Printing Impressions Publishing groups (sister publications of Catalog Success) called Go ‘Green’ From the Inside Out: How to Develop a Corporate Environmental Sustainability Program, Allison Furbish, media relations manager of the baking flour cataloger King Arthur Flour, discussed how her company has made environmental responsibility part of its mission. (This is the first part of a two-part series covering this

As the editor-in-chief of a publication that follows a rather small business niche, I often get an inferiority complex when reading mainstream publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek. By in large, if your company isn’t public and/or doesn’t take in more than a billion dollars a year, you rarely show up on their radar screens. Take the article I read in the July 23 issue of The New York Times that talked about a new direct mail green movement. The headline was “Direct Mail Tries to Go Green. No, Really.” I figured, surely there’d be references to

Unwanted and undeliverable mail benefits no one. For marketers, it’s an unnecessary expense; for consumers, it’s an aggravation; and for policymakers, it’s viewed as counter to environmental stewardship. The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) recently announced an ambitious public goal to significantly reduce unwanted and undeliverable mail. Its efforts hope to save one million tons of carbon dioxide in five years. Each organization in the direct marketing community can and should support this effort. Listed below are several tips you can implement to help. To clean your lists of unwanted mail: 1. Run your prospecting lists against the DMA’s Mail Preference Service monthly, or

Although there were many representatives and speakers in attendance from the U.S. Postal Service at the American Catalog Mailers Association’s recent National Catalog Advocacy & Strategy Forum in Arlington, Va., they all had one common theme to communicate: The USPS is committed to environmental stewardship and sustainability. And the agency provided some numbers to back up those claims. * Advertising mail (i.e., catalogs, direct mail) represents only 2.4 percent of the nearly 246 million tons of municipal solid waste created annually; * more than 35 percent of this advertising mail is recycled; * more than a half billion packages and envelopes provided by the

Many B-to-B marketers are doing everything they can to “go green” these days, certainly the wise thing to do. Thinking green can help save money in these tough times and position your brand with your customers in a favorable light. With privacy, identity theft and the perception of “junk mail/catalogs” all being hot issues in the marketplace, everything we do as B-to-B mailers helps reinforce our positive position.
Merely going green isn’t enough, however. Find ways to communicate with your customers what you’re doing so they “get it.” Make sure your mailings are up-to-date and relevant. For instance, do you allow customers to set