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Print vs. Electronic Media: Has Anyone Asked Customers What THEY Prefer?

Heidi Tolliver-Nigro — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 16:04:23 +0000

Many marketers are pushing their customers toward electronic statements, e-newsletters, bills, and transactional statements as a “green” move, but in reality, it has more to do with economics. It’s cheaper for businesses to send electronic communications than print. But while pushing e-communications as greener, has anyone bothered to ask what customers how they feel about it?

InfoPrint Solutions Company did. A joint venture between IBM and Ricoh, InfoPrint conducted a a survey that found three out of four respondents would consider opting for traditional mail delivery if they were informed it had less of a negative environmental impact than email.

In addition, 50% of consumers indicated that they still prefer to receive marketing information about new products or services via traditional mail rather than email. Only 44% would rather receive marketing via email.

Do preferences convert into action? Yes! Not only do customers prefer print mail, but they are more likely to open it, even if both communications come from a bank.

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Spam Wasted 33 Billion Kilowatt-Hours of Electricity in 2008

Timothy B. Hurst — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 02:18:54 +0000

Conservationists have long been uncomfortable with the environmental impact of the mountains of catalogs, credit card offers, coupons, and other direct mailings that accumulate daily in their mailbox, or on the floor near the front door.

Sure, we can recycle all that junk mail, but that process creates an additional layer of energy inputs from collection, sorting, processing and repurposing, to say nothing of the energy and resources needed to make the mail in the first place. Fortunately—in the United States at least—there are several new services that allow people to take back their mailboxes by blocking catalogs and other junk mail from being delivered.

But when it comes to junk mail in your email inbox, even the best “spam” filters will let a few slip by on occasion. But not everyone uses a spam filter and the environmental impact of all that virtual junk mail is now rivaling that of its papery cousin, according to a new study by McAfee (pdf).

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Zumbox: A Viable Paper Mail Killer?

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 18:46:07 +0000

What are the environmental costs of “snail mail?” That’s easy, right: paper-based mail has a massive footprint when one takes into account the harvesting of trees, the production of paper, and the disposal of much of what we receive in our mail boxes.

What’s the answer? Electronic mail… right?

Well… maybe. If you have someone’s email address, or can easily find it, email as currently configured does provide a viable alternative. But, ever tried to email everyone on your block? If you’re a marketer, ever tried to simply email everyone on your snail mail list? For the most part, unless you’ve taken steps to gather those email addresses, you can’t complete these tasks: email addresses have no immediate connection to a physical address.

Enter Zumbox, a start-up based in the Los Angeles area. Their solution to the paper-email dilemma: create an electronic mailbox for every physical mailing address in the United States.

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The Twelve Days of sustainablog: Email, Passover, and Water

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:19:34 +0000

Spring sprang with a vengeance in April, and despite the bouts of Spring fever, we took our laptops outside to enjoy the new season while keeping the posts flowing.

No foolishness here… just good stories from the wide world of sustainability. Here’s a few of our best…

April 2008

Kelli Best-Oliver introduced us to Readymade magazine’s new digital edition.
Tim Hurst looked forward to the ROTHBURY Music Festival, and the green practices that festival organizers were putting into place.
Bill Chameides from Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment explained how renewable energy sources can help conserve water.

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E-Wasted: Where Will Your Computer and iPod Go to Die?

Simran Sethi — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:34:34 +0000

Simran Sethi and Sarah Smarsh are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post. Want to know how to green your internet porn (or emailing or iTunes) habit? Check out these tips and a post-mortem of where your computers go to die.

Recently, the world computer population surpassed 1 billion. It’s a legion of artificial intelligence that will never die, at least not while humans are around to see it.

The computer species appears to have a high mortality rate (whether due to the rapid progress of technology or an industry conspiracy to ensure that products must be replaced regularly). They “crash” and “die” in droves, their human counterparts literally kicking them to the curb. But there is no heaven, no place in the clouds, for the cold, hard shell once warmed by electrical currents. Once it has left your desk, your computer doesn’t disappear. In a sense, it lives on.

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Shades of Green: Karma Works Online

Jeff McIntire-Strasburg — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:06:00 +0000

It’s no “secret” — karma works online! Thanks to Brad and Peter for another good one. If you liked this, take a look at other “Shades of Green” strips.

The most important news you’ll read this minute: Shea Gunther is leaving Green Options and Planetsave and is converting to Scientology. Praise Xenu.

Noelle dEstries — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:08:05 +0000

Big news Planetsavekateers, I’m outta here.

I’m leaving Green Options and Planetsave, though not to join Tom and John in their fight against the thetans.

I would like to say it’s to spend more time with my family, but that just makes me sound like a scandal ridden Bush official.

While I probably will get to spend more time with my family now, I’m leaving the company to work on my green home project and a few other side projects. My tenure at Green Options and Planetsave has been one of the most interesting, exciting, and invigorating times I’ve had. It ranks as one of my favorite startups (out of my current total of four) and I’m walking away with a greatly expanded network of friends and contacts, a ton of great experience in green publishing, and an awesome project to jump to.

What would have been called “The GO Home Project” is coming with me. I am buying the entire project from Green Options and taking it independent. I’m still working on a name for it (send it on if you have a good one) and will be building a site for it once that’s nailed down, but we’ll be starting up right away on sheagunther.org.

The short of it is is that me and my family are moving into two tipis to live for a year before building the coolest greenest house on the planet. We have 52 acres in North Yarmouth, Maine; the leading green architect in the state; a partnership with Smart HomeOwner Magazine, and a whole lot of great energy pushing it forward. Both me and my wife Heather will be blogging about living in the tipis and I will be set up in a smaller third tipi as my office. I’m sure I’ll have many a five minute snowshoe commutes to work this winter. We’re going to do our best to create a guide and recorded history of our life and work so as to inspire others to do choose the same green building path.

It’s been a great past year building Green Options and past few months working on the new Planetsave, but I’m super excited about all the fun stuff I’ll be able to take on now that my time is freed up from GO/PS work.

Here’s a few places you’ll be able to follow along on my adventures…

- SheaGunther.org - This is my home site, where I started blogging before I knew what blogging was (back in 2001) and current home of Musings of an Eco-Entrepreneur, the most kickass in-stasis eco-entrepreneur blog on the web. It’s been dormant since we launched Green Options but I’ll be doing a relaunch with a new theme in the next week or two. We’ll be blogging about living in the tipis and I’ll have a separate page for my links/musings drops . If you grew to like my blogs here on Planetsave, you’ll want to head over there.

- Treehugger- Graham Hill was kind enough to set up me up with a writing spot at Treehugger. I have to work out the exact details with their uber editor Michael but I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been a huge fan of Treehugger since back in the day (back in the day in the green blogosphere means two+ years ago) and have always wanted to write there. They have such a great group of editors, writers, and an amazing reach- about 25X more daily readers than what Green Options is pulling these days.

- Yet to be named website for the Green Home Project. We’ will be documenting the crap out of our experience building the coolest greenest house on the planet on our yet to be named website. Sheagunther.org is a good place to go to keep up while I figure out what this new thing will be called.

- Stumblegods.com- It’s not really officially launched yet, but my buddy Michael (editor and founder of Groovy Green, founder and publisher of Ecorazzi, chief editor guy at Ecotality Life) and I will be sharing our insights about the power of StumbleUpon at our new site Stumble Gods. Our thumbs move masses baby.

- Ecotality Life- I’ve been working as a consultant with the awesome and talented Brooke Lowry over at Ecotality on the relaunch of their blog. We’ll be getting Ecotality Life up in the next week, in the meantime check out the current site. Ecotality Life will be relaunched with a focus on green gadgets and green business and investing and should be a good read.

- Email: sheagunther@gmail.com, Skype: shea_gunther

It’s been rad, I’ll miss a lot of the people at Green Options and Planetsave. I’ve gotta give it up to my main man Jan, the founder of Planetsave (he sold it to Green Options this Spring and works on both GO and PS stuff) and pimp dad advertising sales guru man. HIC! He’ll be assisted by the talented Noelle d’Estries (Michael’s sister) who will bring her savvy news sense (have you seen the Green Report, that’s all her) and keen wit to the table trying to fill the void that my voluminous ego will leave behind.

Keep up the good fight. Keep on saving the world.

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Quick link: Rolling Stone covers the Great Ethanol Scam

Noelle dEstries — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:08:51 +0000

This is a week or so late, but Rolling Stone has a great article up “Ethanol Scam: Ethanol Hurts the Environment And Is One of America’s Biggest Political Boondoggles“.

When Green Goes Wrong- or When Not to Turn Off the AC

Noelle dEstries — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:58:28 +0000

Oh, this is classic.

Some guy goes into his office over a three day weekend and notices three big AC units blowing. He decides that it would be in the best interest of the planet to turn them off since no one would be working there until Monday. He was saving energy and all. Here’s what went down…

… for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to a halt. This started when employees of The State came in to work following a three day weekend, they found their workstations overloaded with “cannot logon” and “Exchange communication” error messages. The server room was blistering at 109 degrees Fahrenheit and was lying with dead and dying servers. The initial guesses for the disaster was the failure of primary, secondary and tertiary air conditioners all at once. But after cycling the power the A/C’s were working fine. The employees worked day day and night to order new equipment, build new servers and get everything on track. After hundreds of overtime hours and 200 thousand dollars worth equipment they managed to bring everything back online. When the Exchange servers were finally restored, the following email finally made its way to everyone’s inbox, conveniently answering the “why”

Jump to Passive Aggressive Notes to read the poor guy’s email, it’s worth the click.

[Passive Aggressive Notes]

So where do I login to my Planetsave Email?

Noelle dEstries — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:20:36 +0000

Existing Planetsave Email Users- bookmark this page to login to your email account. You can also click on the little email icon dealie over up there in the upper right corner of this page. Yup, right up there.

Planetsave 101 Part 1: What’s with the New Design/Features?

Noelle dEstries — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 11:06:51 +0000

Jan sold out.

Kidding! Jan started Planetsave.com in 1999 and ran it all by himself until just a few months ago when we (Green Options) hired him to run our ad sales team and bought Planetsave.com as part of the deal. Jan was tired of running the site by himself and was eager to breath some new life into it by getting involved in the team that Green Options is.

I was the blog architect for Green Options and was transitioning out of running the day to day Publishing side of things on the site and was really excited to jump on the redesign project. I worked with Jan, my designer Lisa, and developer Scott to come up with this Wordpress-powered refreshed version of Planetsave. The site is going to have more of a blogger focus, though we will continue to feature green and world news.

Here are some of the most note worthy features we are building for this new redesign..

- Our Impact: Jan founded the site upon the idea that he’d kick out a portion of his profits every week to preserve rain forest land. We’re going to expand on that and include wind credits from Renewable Choice Energy and micro-loans made to third world entrepreneurs through Kiva.org. Every week we will increase our impacts in those three areas based on how good business was. The more users we get (and the more emails that are sent), the better our bottom line will be and the bigger positive impact we will have through the rain forest, wind credits, and micro-loans.

- The Email System: Planetsave was founded as a green email system and currently has over 25,000 people logging in every day to get their electronic mail fix. Our basic email account is free and you can choose to expand your impact by upgrading to a $25 or $50 Premium email account. Upgraded accounts come with more storage and land, wind, and microloans.

- Blogging Accounts: We’re just nuts for blogs here at Planetsave and we’ve installed a cool program called Wordpress Multiuser because we think you should be nuts for them as well. For just a couple of bucks a month you can get your own blog here at Planetsave.com. You’ll pick the title; select the template, sidebar items, and categories; and then start writing. You can bring on guest authors and have all the power of Wordpress at your content creating fingers. We’ll watch all our blogs and point our readers to the best content.

We’re all really excited about this new redesign and hope you are too. If you would like to ask any questions about anything, my email is open at shea@planetsave.com.

Tip o’ the Day: Please Consider the Environment Before Printing This Email

Rebecca Carter — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 14:27:33 +0000

Email is the greatest; in fact, we don't know how we survived without it. It's an environmentalist's dream - all of our communications are digital & tree-free! But that's not true, is it? Many of us are still in the habit of printing out our emails, just in case we want to reference it later. This is almost never necessary, and a new trend has sprouted on the internet to combat it.

You might have seen it already on the email signature of one of your contacts. It's a tree with a winding road, and a message: "Please consider the environment before printing this email." We believe this ever so subtle guilt-trip has saved at least several reams of paper so far.

If your email program can handle rich text or html, then you can have the complete signature. The picture of the tree that is being used in this case is actually the letter P using the Webdings font. Then, simply write the message and make the whole thing green. Now you are all set!

Rebecca says: It seems that Gmail isn't letting me use the rich text in the signature. I might have to go without color and tree and simply write the message. Gmail should know better! Did anyone catch their April Fool's joke? It's very appropriate for today's topic: Introducing Gmail Paper.