Special Report: Sustainability & the Environment
Still, catalogers are doing more as a community: The DMA has mounted a national campaign to encourage even more recycling. Sixty catalogers — from Kraft to L.L. Bean to Fairytale Brownies — now support the DMA’s Recycle Please program, encouraging consumers to recycle their catalogs.
Catalogs are an environmentally friendly way to shop. We need to continuously remind people that buying through a catalog replaces trips made by car and thereby reduces carbon dioxide emissions by vehicles. By replacing just two of the many shopping trips we all make each year (at an average of 15 miles round-trip) with shopping by catalog, Americans can reduce the number of miles we drive by 3.3 billion per year and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by more than 3 billion pounds. Not to mention saving nearly half a billion dollars in gas collectively. And with the price of gas now exceeding $4 a gallon in many states, this only makes shopping direct more appealing.
