Wind Turbine Generators

My printer is a nice man. He cares a lot for his customers and even more for the environment. He recently was awarded the ISO 14001 accreditation for environmental management. My printer is also a very curious man. Because he took great pride in his achievement, he decided to share the good  news with his clients. He did so by producing a full colour 2 page leaflet, printed on heavy paper and send in snow-white envelopes, delivered by Royal Mail using a fleet of Royal Mail vans to deliver some 1000 letters to his customers, who read and binned it, so it can be collected by a fleet of London dustmen with their lorries and be burned or taken to landfill sites.

I wonder how much energy and raw material the production and delivery of this promotional piece has consumed and how much CO2 it will produce during its short life-cycle. I think, what ever it was, it was too much and just shows the problem with environmental standards and a false eagerness to behave politically correctly.

What are certifications worth that attest your company best practice in environmental terms but do not set up standards s keeping you away from producing useless marketing collateral, which goes, after having consumed raw materials, added to your carbon footprint and have gone straight to the bin after reading it? It’s not worth the full colour paper it is printed on, and it seems to me rather a warning sign that says “beware of this supplier, he has gone through great length, consumed a lot of energy and left a carbon footprint size 13 to get his environmental management certification”.

How clever is your marketing thinking? Does everything you do interest your customers? Is it not, that the only thing your customers is interested in, is “what’s in it for them”, and do they care a carrot about how great their suppliers feel they are doing? Had the friendly printer celebrated his achievement by combining his leaflet with an offer to order recycling copy paper, and instead of having a full colour leaflet in a separate envelope, had it be a postcard on recycling paper, or even better, an email campaign – I would have understood.

How intimidated are we and how compelled do we feel to adhere certain policies and standards, if we apply so much rigor in meeting them that we violate the very idea by doing so? It seems like we are “going green, no matter what cost to the environment”. A trend, a fad or just another example of skipped common sense?

Perhaps it also shows that even for small businesses the cost of using a consultant can save them from suffering far greater damage as a result from self-harming, image-damaging campaigns.

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