ITEM: CATALOGS
STYLE: NON-RECYCLED PAPER
QUANTITY: XXL
Catalogs—Small on Recycled Paper

How many of the catalog-sales industry's 17 billion mailings did YOU get last year? At the Grinning Planet offices, the holiday catalogs alone filled up three recycle bins, and that was AFTER we had torn out all the toy pages and sent them to Santa.

How many of the catalogs we all get in the mail use recycled paper? According to a November 2002 survey by the watch-dog group Environmental Defense, it's likely that very little recycled paper was in the catalogs you received. Most catalog companies aren't using ANY recycled paper.

Incorporation of recycled paper into catalogs and other products helps reduce the use of trees for paper and helps create a market for the paper that society does manage to recycle. It also reduces pollution because the process of recycling old paper into new paper is less energy-intensive and less polluting than the process of turning trees into new paper. The US Environmental Protection Agency notes that recycling also helps reduce global warming.

You can help by encouraging catalog companies — especially the ones you buy things from — to use recycled paper in their catalogs. The Environmental Defense survey lists the companies they talked to and their phone numbers.

For the catalogs you never look at, you can try to contact the company and ask them not to send future catalogs. Sometimes there is info on how to do this somewhere in the catalog itself or on the company's web site. You can also get on the Direct Marketing Association's "no more junk mail" list to reduce the amount of crapola that ends up in your mailbox in the first place.

(P.S. When we were little, our uncle explained that the word "crapola" was a technical term, and it might be better if we didn't tell Mom we learned it from him.)

Publish date: 22-JAN-2004

Resources:

  - More GP articles on trash/recycling

  - Other sites related to trash/recycling

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"...By allowing businesses to expense up to $75,000, it means somebody is more likely to buy a copying machine, or in this case, an architectural fancy machine."

— President George W. Bush [In a speech promoting his economic stimulus plan, 2003]