Environmental Sustainability

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

In a teleconference last week specifically targeted at the press, Catalog Choice, a nonprofit group that’s been encouraging consumers to opt out of receiving unwanted catalog mailings, set out to clear the air. The organization believes its efforts have been shrouded in misconception, by catalogers and the press alike, since its launch last October. And this call intended to set the record straight. Catalog Choice insists it’s not trying to hasten the end of the catalog business as we know it. Rather, its objective is to be a partner with catalog mailers, providing the opportunity for stronger relationships with consumers based on how

The ever-so-common phrase “going green” means taking the three basic principles of sustainability and applying them everywhere you can in your organization. These principles, of course, are: Reduce — lower your waste and consumption; Reuse — using items multiple times for the same thing; and Recycle — giving something a second life. Environmental stewardship is especially important because our industry is too often viewed as a culprit. The single biggest thing you can do is to better educate yourself. Ask questions about your production process and the materials that are being used. How much do you know about your paper? Where it came

The title of former Vice President Al Gore’s Academy Award-winning film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” sums up the uneasy relationship between catalogers and environmental issues. Catalogers have embraced environmental reforms reluctantly over the years, because they often come with a prohibitive cost. But the issue of environmentalism and sustainability has reached a boiling point this year, what with environmental groups and a number of U.S. states pressing for do-not-mail legislation. You can’t turn your back on these matters any longer. So we felt it was time to give this key issue the attention it warrants. In the stories below, you won’t just find info

Environmental groups Catalog Choice and ForestEthics are hot on catalogers’ tails. So are state governments, with 18 do-not-mail bills under review in 15 states as of the beginning of this year. As if catalogers didn’t have enough adversity — with postage on the rise again and the economy on the fall — they can’t afford to take the issue of environmentalism and sustainability lightly much longer. That’s why we’ve devoted the cover section to this hot topic. Consider the most recent events: • On Oct. 9, 2007, relative newcomer Catalog Choice unveiled its free, Web-based service to encourage consumers to opt out of