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.

In a recent article that was picked up by Planet Green, Cara Smusiak cites the advantages of setting up an online RSVP for your wedding invitations.  With little real evidence to support her claim, Ms. Smusiak argues that “Wedding invitations add up to a giant carbon footprint. Between invitation delivery and RSVP responses, there’s a lot of transportation and mechanical sorting involved—all of which requires energy, which is probably supplied by an unclean energy source.”

At the risk of being ostracized by the green community, I do think Ms. Smusiak’s claim is exaggerated and her advice may, in fact, cause more harm to the environment than sending out wedding invitations.  For instance, the Gartner Group and HP report that the average web user uses 28 pages of paper daily.   In fact, 115 billion sheets of paper are used annually for personal computers:  more than 3 times the volume of first class letters (non-sorted) in the United States.   I guess the question is:  Are we really any better off collectively if  the emailed recipient is simply printing the invitation and direction card at his or her work station?  I don’t know the answer, but I suspect that it is probably a wash.

While I am all for helping the environment, I would like to do so responsibly.  There are many talented invitation designers such as Oblation and Julie Holcomb who have been promoting green papers and eco-friendly printing solutions long before “eco-chic” and green weddings became fashionable.  While we may feel better touting questionable green claims, the movement would be far better served by addressing more serious problems than pretending that wedding invitations are destroying the environment.  ”Green wedding invitations“ sounds cool, but I suspect that it is just simply an ill-considered urban legend that continues to gather momentum without the benefit of much thought, let alone serious debate.

Environmentalists like Scot Case of Terrachoice, regularly point out the sins of “greenwash” and how exaggerated and deceptive claims undermine the environmental cause.    Beating the drum for this particular “cause” is guilty of the sins of irrelevance and lack of proof.

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.