The Stationers Guild

Last Christmas one of my daughters gave me Mark Bittman’s book, Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating.  Clearly more concerned about my growing waistline than my malnourished intellect, my daughter’s inspired gift got me to thinking about calories and food production from an entirely different perspective:  the environment.  In Mr. Bittman’s eye-opening introduction he asserts that, according to the United Nations Food and Agricultual Organization (FAO), “global livestock production is responsible for one-fifth of all greenhouse gases – more than transportation.”

Mark Bittman, the noted food critic for the New York Times, and straight-man to hilarious chef Mario Batali in Spain… On The Road Again, makes an utterly convincing case for reducing our meat consumption and  ”save ourselves and our planet (and some money) by doing so.”  While I have not yet swapped cow for tofu, my daughters will be delighted that I have decided to moderate my diet and eat more responsibly.  In addition to practical reasons for modifying our eating habits, Food Matters has 75 great recipes to help facilitate that change.

You may be asking, what does stationery have to do with global livestock production?   A cynical answer might be that if everyone were to skip the double cheeseburger and instead send out a hand-written note the world be a better place.  Surely, a nice piece of social correspondence doesn’t  use  any more paper than the wrapping paper and bag that accompanies your 700 calorie burger.

While it is fashionable to be “green” I am always a bit skeptical of “green” claims when it comes to paper.   Scot Case of TerraChoice discusses the seven sins of greenwash which are routinely violated in most ”green” stationery promotions.   I am not sure if these questionable claims are deliberate, but stretching the truth seems to be a common and growing trend within the stationery industry.  It is indeed unfortunate as there are so many passionate and talented designers and craftspeople like Julie Holcomb, Oblation Papers and Elum Designs where “green” is a way of life rather than misleading promotional hype.

Mr. Bittman’s book on eating habits and global livestock production brings home a sad truth:  We seem to spend far too much time focusing micro-issues while  the “big green picture” gradually slips out of control.  Certainly, global livestock production and packaging, which represents more than 40% of all paper production, are far more serious environmental concerns than the simple yet elegant act of sending a personal note.

I was somewhat taken aback but hardly surprised that the National Stationery Show will partner with Get Married to produce a series of bridal theme displays.  The National Stationery Show is scheduled for May 17 through May 20 at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City.

I must admit that I am not familiar with Get Married’s pedigree, but a cursory review of their website suggests that it offers little more than the myriad of online wedding sites that populate cyberspace.  What does Get Married have to offer that The Knot or the Wedding Channel or indeed a boatload of other wedding portals don’t have?  These hyped-up wedding portals are designed to sell, not inform.  Their value is largely determined by the all-powerful advertising dollar, not relevance to the consumer or the craftspeople and designers who make fine stationery products.

While I applaud The National Stationery Show planners for enlisting the help of a “wedding planner” to help showcase bridal theme displays, why did they select an online wedding website?  I view this as a sell-out to online resellers and online printers who are rapidly undermining the craftsmanship of fine stationery and custom invitations.  The National Stationery Show organizers should be chastised for promoting distribution channels rather than the artisans who make fine stationery and invitations and the experienced stationers who sell them.

Online wedding websites should be judged by their advertising sponsors, the products they promote and the distribution channels found on their website.  Specifically, I judge the integrity of wedding portals by the number of “true” local businesses that are listed under local resources.  For instance, Get Married, today listed six sources for local invitations and calligraphy in Connecticut on their website.  Four and probably five of these “stationers” are national resellers or printers.   Get Married is no different than The Knot or Martha Stewart Weddings who promote national resellers and printers as local resources.  How sad it is that these website owners have so little regard for the online buyer who may be looking for an experienced stationer in their neighborhood and invitation designers and fine paper lines who would never consider selling invitations online.

In an era when our public leaders quibble over the definition of  “is”, how can we expect website owners and search engines to agree that “local” refers to a business at a fixed location.  An 800 or 888 prefix is not a local business.  It is most unfortunate that online buyers searching for genuine local resources now have to sort through irrelevant, yes dishonest, search results that have been compromised by advertising fees paid to these wedding portals.

As a long-time visitor the National Stationery Show, I can’t wait to see the Eco-Chic wedding theme table promised by the organizers.  I suspect that the “Eco-chic wedding”  is just another questionable marketing ploy by the organizers to make us feel good about buying invitations that are produced from recycled paper and post-consumer waste.  Like the marketing spin on local resources, I suspect that this is simply   Greenwash spin that only serves to discourage leading craftspeople where concern for the environment is simply an integral part of their everyday life.

This is the second installment of an article summarizing a conference at January’s National Gift Show at the Javits Center entitled “Get Real . . . Green Verification and Certification” that I attended this week.   The conference demonstrated how difficult it is to verify “green” claims some of the pitfalls in the verification process.  If you wish to read the first installment, please visit “Green Verification & Certification – Part 1“.

The second speaker was Mac McCoy, the Founder and CEO of the Tibet Collection.  While equally committed to the environment, Mr. McCoy approaches the issue from a somewhat different perspective:  How to you assure yourself that goods sourced from abroad meet fair trade standards?   While respect for the environment is clearly an important consideration, the Fair Trade Federation also examines labor practices and the creation sustainable businesses that adopt fair and sound business practices.

Mr. McCoy believes that “Fair Trade” is built on three principles:  Dialogue, Transparency and Respect.  The Fair Trade Federation is supported by members who commit to use sound business practices and to voluntarily work with other like-minded organizations throughout the world.  Companies who source from abroad and the United States can used the Fair Trade Federation to determine if their suppliers are members of the Federation.

Mr. McCoy believes that organizations like the Fair Trade Federation are raising awareness within the business community to support businesses that act responsibly.  Nevertheless, it is an “evolving” process that is gathering momentum and certainly helpful in building sustainable business in the emerging markets.

This week I attended a conference at the Javits Center National Gift Show entitled “Get Real . . . Green Verification and Certification.”  Like most responsible people (although my wife might disagree), I wish to use our planet’s resources wisely.  I had hoped that behaving “green” was as simple as plugging in a purchasing decision or behavior pattern into a carbon footprint calculator and voila:  pat yourself on the back for doing the right thing!  Little did I know how mistaken I was.

The Javits Center conference showed how difficult it is to verify “green” claims.  Three speakers from quite different backgrounds, but equally committed to the environment, shared their insights on how one might go about green verification and some of the pitfalls in this process.  I have broken down the Blog into three parts to summarize each speaker’s presentation and keep the article to manageable proportions.

Alan Honick, a documentary filmaker most of his life, traced the complexities of environmental sustainability by discussing his research on the controversy over the Northern Spotted Owl and logging in the northwest.  Clearly, there is far more to the subject than simply an endangered species.  He argues that all factors – including human – need to be taken into consideration when looking at environmental issues.  I had a chance to talk to Alan after the conference and he pointed me to the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) for more information on this important subject.  He believes that the FSC does an excellent job in keeping the “human economy” in sync with natural ecology.  See Mr. Horick’s fascinating 10-part video in 9 minute segments entitled “Critical Habitat”:

Despite the somber tone of this excellent video, it captures the complexities of tinkering with mother nature and the difficulties in developing sustainability models that balance environmental, economic and social needs.  Out of countless interviews with advocacy groups and scientists, Mr. Honick featured 18 special-interest advocates and 15 scientists in the video to provide a balanced presentation of the issues involved.  I was most fascinated with the role of millipede which is responsible for processing 95% of the organic matter in the forest.  As Mr. Honick correctly points out, the Northern Spotted Owl was just a side-show for a very complex problem.

I was recently drawn to a news article published December 4, 2008 in the New York Times entitled “How Green Can a Christmas Trees Be?“  The article strongly suggests that buying a Christmas tree free of pesticides and fungicides is like finding a needle in a haystack.  The article infers that the vast majority of the 31 million trees sold in the United States last year contain some form of chemical treatment.

As stationers, we are sensitive to environmental concerns and monitor evolving trends in the industry.  Many of the leading boutique design firms have clear environmental guidelines on the materials used in producing fine stationery and custom invitations.  This is particularly true for many firms that design letterpress wedding invitations.  Many insist on using only papers produced from organically grown cotton and most have shifted from using oil-based inks to vegetable inks.  Smock Paper has gone one step further in producing beautiful letterpress invitations from bamboo.

Letterpress on Bamboo by Smock Paper

Having attended several conferences on the environment, I must sadly conclude this is a complex subject and that there are many shades of “green” when it comes to intelligent debate.   What disturbs me the most is the vast number of unsubstantiated claims made by merchandisers anxious to get on the “green” bandwagon.  Scot Case of TerraChoice Environmental Marketing described Six Sins of Greenwash at a business conference last summer.

As consumers, we want to be seduced by the notion that we are “doing the right thing for the environment” by using recycled paper for wedding invitations.  Don’t you feel cheated when you find out that only 30% comes from recycled paper? Did you stop to consider that paper made from cotton and recycled cotton rag from textiles mills has been a “green” choice for over 200 years?  Granted, the carbon footprint left behind by the production of paper and the use of pesticides and herbicides are serious concerns, but one needs to step back from the green “hype” or “Greenwash” and make decisions on what you see in front of you.  As Scot Case of TerraChoice says, “all decisions you make inevitably leaves a carbon footprint, the real challenge is to make the ones that are less harmful to the environment.”

Contact a Guild member store in your neighborhood to learn more about how you can make informed decisions about the environment.  Choosing a green wedding invitation may not be as difficult as you thought.