My name is Shawn Asselin and I’m the Sales Manager for Data-Mail.

GMC: We’re finding companies are implementing a wide range of green initiatives, from alternative energy resources to subsidized public transit use by employees to sophisticated recycling/reuse programs. What are some of the green initiatives you have implemented in your company?

SA: Well, Gail, first let me begin by thanking you for the opportunity to speak to you today on behalf of my colleagues at Data-Mail.  You know, we’re proud to be a founding member of the Green Marketing Coalition and we’re a strong supporter of green initiatives in our industry.  We consider ourselves to be a leader in the direct mail, print, and production industry. We employ about 800 people in the Hartford Connecticut area, and mail about 5 million pieces of mail a day.

We believe we’re very proactive and proud to be innovative on various green initiatives internally.  You know, for example, in our print department, 100 percent of the energy used comes from renewable sources.  The monitors that we use for pre-press department are low energy and we have a robust recycling program that recycles not only our print and trim waste but also office waste as well, including print toner cartridges. 

We have U.S. Post Offices on-site in our facilities, where we sort and group the mail, which helps reduce trucking and lowers our carbon footprint.  We’ve invested heavily in commingling equipment this past year, which reduces our clients’ postage costs by sorting and shipping the mail for various customers together by common Zip codes thus requiring less trucking also.

We’ve also recently converted the lighting in our production facilities to high-efficiency devices with motion activators and we now produce materials in-house such as marketing membership cards for direct mail, which were previously purchased on the outside from a vendor in Chicago which required multiple shipments per order to deliver to us on the East Coast.

GMC: Are you finding your customers are asking you for more sustainable choices for their direct marketing projects? For instance, papers with higher post consumer waste (PCW) content or vegetable-based inks?

SA: Yes, they definitely are.  Clients are more environmentally aware and we are responding accordingly.  We are both FSC and FSI (sic) certified, which is you know the two primary third-party forest certification agencies, and they ensure that forests are managed in a responsible manner.

Clients frequently specify that we source paper for them that uses these certifications and many paper producers have responded by narrowing or eliminating the premium that these papers have historically cost in the past.

It’s a common misconception that these environmentally friendly papers carry a significant cost premium.  As an example one of our primary offset paper suppliers is a local New England paper mill that uses a biomass energy process to produce the paper and uses no fossil fuels in their papermaking.  By being a local mill, the paper also requires less trucking and it uses less fuel to deliver the paper to us, again, reducing the carbon footprint.  Also, some of our paper mill partners produce paper using electricity that is renewed by wind power or other sources of clean energy.

In our printing process, we use low VOC (volatile organic compounds) inks in our print department which are vegetable or soy-based as opposed to traditional chemical or petroleum-based inks.  And increasingly we find many of our customers and prospective clients will ask us these types of questions before awarding us the print order, frankly, or even allowing us to bid on their work.