Enemy of the Trees

The day before Thanksgiving we received our newspaper the News Press. Ordinarily this paper contains three or four sections with 36 to 48 pages.On Wednesday the paper weighed over five pounds and was filled with inserts making people aware of all the great bargains to be had on Black Friday; over a hundred inserts, some like small catalogues and all in color filled the sections of the paper.

The paper was in a waterproof bag and the regular paper was in another. Many hundreds of advertisements would end up in the garbage or recycling basket. With a readership of thousands I could not believe how many trees would be required to fulfill the need for the newsprint and fine paper used for this one event.

We are in a small service area in the USA and if you count the paper products used this day across America it would really make you think. Today with computers and on line shopping surely we could do better to take care of our precious resource, trees.

I would think that this is a low return type of advertising as these same clients who were involved this day had already flooded our mail many times during the past week. We can only hope that our recovery of this resource is covered by our much better recycling modes will help.