Category: Environment

Sustainability in the mailing industry refers to the efforts made to minimize the environmental impact associated with mail and package delivery processes. It involves implementing practices that reduce energy consumption, waste generation, and carbon emissions while maximizing efficiency and resource conservation.

Porridge Papers – Paper Made By Craftsmen

This is a great video about the making of paper. Not only does it capture the art and craft of paper-making, it is a well-produced video that portrays the essence of community and determination.

The story of one man (and his family and community) determined to create great paper the old-fashioned way, from the excess paper of envelopes.

So grab a cup of coffee, find a quite place, and take in this inspiring video…

This awesome short film was curated by Windstream… We couldn’t help but love that name. 😉

It’s part of a series of videos produced for the Tumblr blog Locally Crafted. In addition, the film was directed by Kevin Osgood, brother-in-law to one of our very own LetterStream employees.

Nicely done Kevin!

 

"Green" or Simply "Responsible"?

Green and Responsible Mail

Are we green or just being responsible?

I go back and forth on whether we use the greatly-over-used “green” label on what we do; quite often opting instead to use the term “responsible“. After all, we print and mail, and the word on the street is you can’t be “green” if that’s what you do (I could give you compelling reasons why that isn’t true, but I’ll save that for another day).

My point is that we work extra hard to be responsible with the by-products of our production process. We sort it, weigh it, categorize it, and talk about it; all in an effort to be responsible with our waste. Our efforts to improve in this area have been phenomenal over the years and we are proud of the job we’re doing.

Of our total facility waste, we have found ways to reuse a staggering 46% of all production waste. To be clear, this isn’t recycling, this is actual reuse by others outside of the LetterStream organization.  As for recycling, 50% of our waste is being properly recycled, leaving us with only 4% of our waste actually making it to a trash dumpster.

Is that green, or just responsible? Maybe both.

Saving Trees and Securing Data

While reviewing our bills today, I noticed our Certificate of Destruction receipt from our shredding service. It now includes a nice little notice of how many trees we’ve saved by our shredding efforts.

shredding receipt
36.4 trees saved!

The receipt shows 36.4 trees saved so far this year. I’m not exactly sure how they calculate it, but I’m guessing it has something to do with the weight and/or volume of paper that we present to them for onsite shredding.

The primary purpose of our shredding efforts is to protect private data from falling into the wrong hands. Shredding helps us comply with HIPAA and PHI rules and keeps our data private.

Our internal policies state that everything we print and even documents that we receive be shredded unless we are mailing them. As an extra precaution, all shredding takes place at our facility with our staff supervising the process.

That’s good for clients…and good for trees too, it seems!

 

Envelopes Made with Wind Power?

Wind Power

We are always looking for ways to be a little more environmentally responsible in our printing and mailing practices, and we’ve found another good idea to implement. It is fun to talk about as well! You see, the bulk of our envelopes are now generated using wind power.

Quite often our customers don’t actually see the mail we send on their behalf, but if they did, they’d see a WindPower icon beside our SFI certification mark on the back of the envelopes we use. Cool!