<blockquote>"On the margin, mail has environmental benefits. These include reducing carbon emissions by replacing individual car trips with remote transactions. Examples include pharmaceuticals by mail (fewer trips to the drug store), DVD rental by mail (fewer trips to the video store), and catalog shopping (fewer trips to the mall)."</blockquote>
Nice, but it applies to goods the recipients have ordered through those remote transactions, not to the junk mail. Nobody says mail delivery of desired goods doesn't have environmental benefits. That paragraph belongs in the spin section.
Since you mention pharmaceuticals, I'd much rather plan to combine that trip to the drug store with other necessary errands and have the pharmacist hand me the drugs directly. Where I live I'm always returning misdelivered mail to the post office, including someone else's prescription drugs at least once.
Ms. Landman --
I guess we have a different interpretation of the word "choice." I argue that consumers already have choice -- the DMA website is one place to exercise mail preferences, but there are others if you don't find that one to your liking, including companies that will get you off mailing lists for a fee.
On the forest question, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations noted, in its 2007 State of the World's Forests report (ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/009/a0773e/a0773e00.pdf) that the world lost a total of 3% of its forest cover from 1990-2005, or an average of 0.2% per year. If you read the report, you will see that deforestation is a complex issue with many, many causes, and it is hard to draw a link between direct mail in the United States and this global phenomenon. The same UN report notes, by the way, that forest coverage in the US and Canada is stable.
Does the mailing industry have environmental issues? Absolutely -- just like all other industries. We can and must do all we can to reduce our environmental footprint, and responsible companies across the sector are already engaged in that process for sound business reasons.
Matt Broder
Vice President, External Communications
Pitney Bowes Inc.
<blockquote>"Add up the weight of newpapers and the ads in them and one will see that the average weight of newspapers exceeds the average weight of ads through the US Mail. How about those unwanted ads in the magazines as well?"</blockquote>
This about those unwanted ads in magazines and newspapers: people <i>chose</i> -- I think "opted in" is the modern term, isn't it? -- to subscribe to the magazines and newspapers. Which chosen subscribing, by the way, is getting more problematic:
http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/magazines/secondclass_postage_and_the_death_of_the_smallrun_magazines_78309.asp
Given my druthers, I'd hike junkmail rates and keep second class rates low to help magazines and papers that people actually want to read stay in business.
<blockquote>"The senders of the mail are the ones bearing the costs to send them the ads."</blockquote>
Perhaps not entirely. See above. Also,
<blockquote>"...Individuals have control of the ads. They can peruse them at their leisure or simply discard them in their recycle bin."</blockquote>
Newsflash: recycling doesn't happen by magic. It costs money, whether you have to buy authorized recycling bags from your city or just have it included in your tax bill. You pay for it one way or another.
That's one thing about living in a very small town -- you're less insulated from the knowledge of what things like transporting trash to recycling centers is costing municipalities as fuel prices keep going up. And in some places there's simply no way to dispose of your trash that results in its being recycled. "Just toss it in the recycling bin" is simply the junkmailers' denial of how they externalize (i.e., socialize) the cost of disposal. YOU should quit arguing nonsense.
<blockquote>"When I am on the internet, I don't want to be bothered with ads or popups. Those are far more annoying that ad mail."</blockquote>
May I suggest Firefox? It's free and it's pretty darn good at blocking unwanted popups. :-)
I have observed that DMA's do-not-mail list is poorly promoted and difficult for consumers to find and access, particularly for people without an Internet connection. A government-sponsored "Do Not Mail" list could receive greater promotion resulting in greater awareness and use.
I would also argue that globally, the amount of tree farming now occurring has not made up for the amount of deforestation that has already occurred, and is ongoing.
As for the statement that mail in general has benefits, well of course that is the case. You are construing annoyance with junk mail as annoyance at mail in general. While junk mail probably constitutes the greater part of the mail in general these day (thus making mail in general fairly annoying), people still do need and like postal mail for real needs, like delivery of items (purchased on EBay!;)), staying in contact with family and friends, paying bills, etc.
But finally, having choice is part of the freedom this country stands for (or at least that it used to stand for). For an industry to work to <em>block</em> people from having more choices about how to regulate their mail is onerous, to say the least. We can buy spam blockers to keep our electronic in-boxes from getting cluttered with unwanted ads. Why shouldn't we be able to choose to block unwanted mail from our snail-mailboxes?
By the way, I asked my own mail man (who shall remain anonymous) about his feelings about junk mail in general. He told me he takes all the postage-paid cards he gets in the junk mail that he receives personally, and just mails them back to the senders blank, to cost companies money and keep himself in a job. In a time of increasing energy prices, rising costs of transportation, printing, paper, etc., this just all seems to be an endless and ridiculously embarrassing waste. I would like to think we can do better.
Anne Landman
Pages