The U.S. Postal Service recently released the results of an 11-month old report that pegged the environmental cost of commercial and nonprofit Standard A (advertising) Mail at $126 million or less than 0.2 cents per piece. The study debunks the long-standing myth that catalogers and other direct marketers are responsible for the disposal of huge amounts of paper in the nation’s solid waste stream.
The report, covering the years between 1987 and 1996 and filed with the USPS last August, was prepared for the postal service’s Environmental Management Policy office by Project Performance Corp., Sterling, VA.
Project Performance found that pollution from direct marketing “is far less than other waste types such as plastics, metals, food wastes, glass and other paper/paperboard products” which account for 98 percent of the nation’s municipal solid waste.
“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.
Envisioning the continued growth of Standard A Mail, the study notes that in 1996 businesses and nonprofits mailed about 72 billion pieces, or 4.5 tons of mail, accounting for 39 percent of the 183 billion pieces of mail delivered in that year. Eighty percent of that mail, the study found was mailed at commercial rates with the remaining 20 percent mailed at nonprofit rates.
The study also points out that advertising mail accounted for 90 percent of the commercial Standard A Mail received by U.S. households in 1995, up slightly more than 10 percent from 1987. Half of that mail, it added, was from “mail order companies, publishers, department/specialty stores, insurance and credit card companies. Overall, the study found that a majority (62.7 percent versus 29.2 percent) of advertising mail recipients found what they received from a marketer to be either useful or interesting.
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