Catalog Choice - You decide what gets in.

Earth Day 2009, read more about it here and here, is a time to reflect and celebrate.  Millions of people around the world will do things a little different on Earth Day to preserve resources and lighten their footprint on the Earth.  Lots of us will ride our bikes to work, eat locally-grown food, print fewer documents, and take stock of all the resources we use to get our jobs done.

At Catalog Choice, we are celebrating Earth Day by making it easier for consumers and merchants to reduce the amount of unwanted mail in their mailbox and go paperless.  We are celebrating the accomplishments of our one million members and 500 catalog partners who together, in just 18 months, have:

• removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.
• Saved more than 192,000 trees and
• Prevented 82 million pounds of greenhouse gas emissions, the equivalent of removing about 7,500 cars off the road (Source: Environmental Defense paper calculator)

These are significant accomplishments for our community.  These are saving that don’t materialize if we take the easy way out and just recycle or throw away unwanted catalogs.  These savings require our members to record their mail preference for each catalog title and our merchant partners to integrate our preference file into their mailing processes.  While it seems easy, there are lots of moving parts that need to fit together to make the process work.  Today, we are celebrating the fact that we have used the power of the Internet and human ingenuity to removed over 85 million unwanted catalogs a year from the mail stream.

For Earth Day’s sake, let’s do more to develop processes that make our world more resource efficient.  In the world of direct marketing, let’s improve channels of communication between consumers and companies so that companies can get their marketing messages to the people who want them as efficiently as possible.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Catalog Choice, Featured, Reducing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.