Sustainable Mail? — A Q&A With Mal Warwick

EB: How did you move toward sustainable direct mail?

MW: Direct mail is in many ways an environmentally wasteful procedure. We were conscious of that from the beginning. In the mid-’80s, our newly hired production manger laid out a plan for us to do everything we could to pioneer something approaching sustainable direct mail. So we were one of the early advocates and users of recycled paper. We used soy-based inks that were less toxic on the environment. We placed a very high value on merge/purge when there were still a lot of people in the business who were using that only selectively.