Ah, yes, Earth Day. Our annual reminder that what we do isn’t particularly nice to many other creatures. Happily, the trade media turn their Mirror, Mirror on the Wall rhetoric up to high and devote entire issues to reassuring us that we are the Greenest Ones of All, despite all kinds of evidence to the contrary.
But now it’s May and the environmentalists have been put away with the Christmas ornaments and inflatable bunnies for another year. So how are we really doing with all this green stuff? Not so well, I’d say.
Sure, we’re sending more email and less paper. Could that have anything to do with the fact that email is basically free and physical mail isn’t? I thought not. It’s entirely our deep affection for tree snails driving that one. Hooray for us for greening. Now let’s look at our packaging.
Oh, dear. How many Styrofoam peanuts are we sticking to the clothing of the world each day? How many of those impenetrable clam shell packages are we shipping? How about all that bubble wrap or weird plastic padding? Or things that are just plain over-packaged because we can do it? Ok, the packaging needs work. I would bet the user documentation and sales literature isn’t far behind.
Let’s come back to direct mail. We all bolted from that steaming pile years ago but I’m noticing a lot more dead trees in my post these days. Could it be that the paper companies have figured out how to get the agencies thinking about really great direct again? After all, Direct Marketing News tells me that paper is the most renewable resource on earth (and I thought that that was interns) and that many more trees are planted these days (in Canada) than are harvested.
All that deforestation, it turns out, is for agriculture in the Third World and not for junk mail in the First. So poor people are to blame and the junk mail trees are turned into paper with the liberal application of pixie dust instead of the hydrocarbons we previously needed to cut, move, pulp, bleach, squish, dry, cut, wrap and ship paper. Well that’s a load off my mind.
No wonder then some company thought it was okay to send out a not green direct mail package, the centrepiece of which was a two foot by four foot poster with a stock photo on it. Now the idea was as clever as all get out but what the heck am I going to do with an eight-foot square picture of furniture on 100lb (coated, of course) stock. Oh yeah, put it in the recycle bin. Great use of carbon there.
Then there was the mailing which included a talking brochure. Just like those annoying greeting cards, this thing played a 15-second commercial when I opened it. But when I closed it, my delight with its cleverness was replaced by my dilemma at its disposal. I couldn’t put it in the recycle bin because the tiny batteries, speaker and chip are not paper.
I couldn’t put it in the garbage because batteries and electronics have half-lives longer than Margaret Thatcher’s. In the end I took it apart and tried to give it a decent burial. I wonder how many of the tens of thousands of other recipients did likewise.
It occurs to me, however, that while I was stuffing these (and other) egregious wastes of trees and energy into the right bins, some Creative Goddess at an agency was stuffing a congratulatory bit of foie gras into her mouth celebrating just how clever she really is.
Clever? Yes. Smart? Not so much. Green? Are you kidding?
Related Posts
You are Not Green
Time to Bring Down the Curtain on Green Theatre
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.