Inside the Recycling Tub: Catalogs & Direct Mail, Post-Consumer

During the early 1990s, millions of consumers wrote their request to the then-Mail Preference Service (MPS, now DMAchoice) to remove themselves from national mailing lists, partially as a result of the media hype around that publication and its recommendation to consumers to sign up for MPS. Even some cities and towns urged their citizens (with taxpayer money) to get off mailing lists. I don't think the Direct Marketing Association released publicly its MPS consumer registration figures, but it swelled to the point where some saturation mailers nearly considered not using the file for fear it would disqualify them for the lowest postage within certain ZIP Codes where new MPS registrants were concentrated. (DMA developed a saturation mailer format at the time to preserve MPS utility.)

Removing names from a mailing list is what solid waste management professionals call "source reduction"—an act that prevents the production of mail (and later waste) in the first place.

One of the reasons "junk mail" met with some consumer hostility then was simply because once you were done with a catalog or mail piece, wanted or not, there was no place to put it except in the trash. It seemed to many, "All this waste!" (that actually amounted to about 2.3 percent of the municipal solid waste stream back then).

Thankfully, there were other marketplace and public policy dynamics tied to support of the green movement, circa 1990. In a word, "recycling" (like source reduction) was seen as a part of responsible solid waste management. At the time, North American paper mills were scrambling to get recovered fiber to manufacture paper products and packaging with recycled content. Some states (and the federal government) set minimum recycled-content and "post-consumer" recycled-content percentage requirements for the paper they procured, while California mandated diversion goals for solid waste from its landfills. Increasingly, foreign trading partners were clamoring for America's discarded paper to meet their ravenous demands for fiber. The cumulative results were an aggressive increase in the amount of paper collected for recycling and the number of collection points across the United States.

All this boded well for catalogs and direct mail, as far as their collection rates. Catalogs and magazines are considered equivalent when it comes to their fiber makeup. They do tend to have more hardwood (short, thinner fibers) versus softwood (long, strong fibers) since the hardwood gives a nice, smooth printing surface. When they are collected for recycling, recovered catalogs and magazines are suitable for lower quality paper/packaging grades, as well as for tissue. Some of the fiber does wind up getting used as post-consumer waste in new magazines and catalogs, but producers of such papers much prefer having recovered office paper (ideally not mixed with other lower-quality post-consumer papers) as their source of post-consumer content, as the quality is better for making higher quality magazine/catalog papers. (See link below from Verso Paper.)

Most direct mail when recovered is classified as mixed papers, and is suitable for tissue, packaging and other recovered-fiber products. (Today, a lot of paper recovery mixes it all together, and with positive reuse.) By 2007, DMA had received permission from the Federal Trade Commission to begin allowing mailers to place "recyclable" messages and seals on catalogs and mail pieces (roughly 60 percent of U.S. households must have access to local recycling options before "recyclable" labels can be used). Upon this FTC opinion, DMA promptly launched its "Recycle Please" logo program. By 2010, in addition, thousands of U.S. post offices were placing "Read-Respond-Recycle" collection bins for mixed paper in their lobbies.

When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began tracking "Standard Mail" in its biennial Municipal Solid Waste Characterization Report in 1990, the recovery rate (through recycling collection) was near 5 percent. By 2009 (the most current year reported), the recovery rate had increased more than 10-fold to 63 percent—but I cite this figure with a big asterisk. There will be a discussion in a future post on why the EPA MSW recycling data may not be as accurate (and as optimistic) as these findings seem to present. In fact, the EPA itself has asked for public comment on how its current MSW study methodology can be improved—again, more on that in another post.

While I'm not an expert on solid waste reporting, I certainly can see the positive direction underway here, no matter what the actual recovery rate may be. The more catalogs and direct mail that are recovered for their fiber, chances are that there will be more efficient use of that fiber in the supply chain, rather than ending up in a landfill. That helps relieve pressure on paper and packaging pricing, which is good for our bottom lines.

It might also, just a little bit, make a consumer think to herself "I love my junk mail"—as she takes the no-longer-needed mail at week's or season's end and places it into a recycling tub. Recycling makes us feel good. It is simple to do. Recycling may not truly save the Earth, but it certainly does extend the life of an importantly renewable natural resource, wood fiber.

Helpful links:

• Joel Makower's Take on the 21^st Century edition of 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth:
  http://makower.typepad.com/joel_makower/2008/03/the-death-and-r.html

• DMA's Recycle Please logo program for labeling Catalogs, Direct Mail, Inserts, Packing Slips and Other Printed Marketing Communications: http://www.dmaresponsibility.org/Recycle/

• DMA's dmaChoice program: https://www.dmachoice.org

• EPA Municipal Solid Waste Characterization Report - 2009:
  http://www.epa.gov/osw/nonhaz/municipal/msw99.htm

• Verso Paper's White Paper on Recycling Fiber:
  http://www.versopaper.com/uploadedFiles/Sustainability/Main%20Content/Position%20Papers/PaperRecycling.pdf