Direct Mail Adds Little to Environmental Costs

The U.S. Postal Service has released the results of a report that estimates the environmental cost of Standard A mail at $126 million, or less than 0.2 cents per piece.

That is “far less than other waste types such as plastics, metals, food wastes, glass and other paper/paperboard products,” which account for 98% of the nation’s municipal solid waste, the report says.

The study seeks to debunk the long-standing contention that catalogers and other direct marketers are responsible for huge amounts of paper in the nation’s solid waste stream.

“Direct orders from catalogs replace shopping trips typically made in automobiles, thus reducing the number of traffic accidents, the amount of pollution emitted by automobiles and the amount of gasoline consumed [to] raise the value of catalog shipping to approximately $400 million a year,” the study notes.

Project Performance Corp., Sterling, VA, prepared the report for the postal service’s Environmental Management Policy office. It filed the results, covering the years between 1987 and 1996, with the USPS last August but they were not released until recently.

The research concerns commercial and nonprofit Standard A (advertising) mail. The study notes that in 1996 businesses and nonprofits sent out about 72 billion pieces, or 4.5 tons of mail, accounting for 39% of the 183 billion mail pieces delivered that year.

It also points out that advertising mail made up 90% of the commercial Standard A mail received by U.S. households in 1995, up slightly more than 10% from 1987. Half of that mail, it added, was from “mail order companies, publishers, department/specialty stores, insurance and credit card companies.”

Households that did not make any mail order purchases in 1994 received 7.9 pieces of Standard A mail per week in 1995 while those households making 11 or more purchases from a mail order house got 17.7 pieces per week, the study found.

It also revealed that Standard A mail was well received by consumers. In 1995, 73% of all commercial advertising mail was read or looked at by consumers, up from just 68% in 1987. Only 15.9% of it was “immediately discarded.”

Charities, educational and religious institutions are the largest nonprofit users of Standard A mail, accounting for half of all nonprofit direct mail in 1995, the study found. The other half is used by medical facilities, professional and political organizations, veterans’ groups and museums. Forty-two percent of that mail contained requests for donations, while 31% were pure advertisements.