You don’t have to feel quite so guilty when you next thumb through the Victoria’s Secret catalogue. (Yes you – you know who you are.) Environmental groups have been protesting their (specifically, the parent company Limited Brands) practices for a long while – they produce about one million catalogues per day, printed on virgin paper, including paper from forests that came habitats of endangered species such as the caribou in parts of Northern and Western Canada. The good news is that they have now committed to stop using virgin paper, and use a significant component of recycled paper for the catalogues, in addition to stopping the use of the paper from endangered habitats. From an article in Reuters:
The company’s catalogs will use either 10 percent recycled paper or 10 percent new paper from sources certified by the Forest Stewardship Council as having been produced in an environmentally sustainable manner.
You can read much more about the result at ForestEthics’ site.
Ok, back to your lingere shopping now*.
-cvj
John Branch, you’re right! When it comes to stamping out wrongdoing, singling out one catalog over another is wrong. Therefore, prior to browsing through my vast collection of adulterated catalogs that I annoyingly receive–on a regular basis– via snail mail, I guess I ought to put them through rigorous forensic analysis to determine if their truly virgin or not.;)
I wonder how, and why, Victoria’s Secret got singled out for this attention.Vast numbers of catalogs (along with brochures and other marketing materials) are produced in America every day and dumped in the mail, and some proportion of this is unwanted. I can imagine a few positive consequences; purchases as a result of direct-mail campaigns may contribute measurably to our economy, and the money paid to the postal service may help subsidize postage rates for ordinary mail (although for all I know the reverse could be true instead). But there’s an awful lot of paper being wasted in the process. To complain only about Victoria’s Secret role in this seems like complaining that a particular brand and model of SUV is a fuel and resources hog.
Kristin,
Yes it is a good question. A million catalogues a day seems excessive in this day and age when there is so much online browsing. I find this puzzling. Perhaps their business model somehow does not use the web as strongly as one might have thought.
-cvj
Clifford:including paper from forests that came habitats of endangered species such as the caribou in parts of Northern and Western Canada. The good news is that they have now committed to stop using virgin paper, and use a significant component of recycled paper for the catalogues, in addition to stopping the use of the paper from endangered habitats.
While I myself have some understanding of the processes used, I couldn’t help be drawn to this statement.
I of late had mentioned on cosmic variance an issue that I had been thinking about in terms of “bug infestations” that nature has bestow upon trees. Now “weather” was important in terms of the temperatures needed so as to kill these insects. If it did not reach the 30 to 40 below temperature for at least two weeks then the “anti freeze they inject into the tree’s outer edges” would not prevent them from being wipe out by the freezing cold.
What is then left, is a devastation that few in the populations of cities do not realize. Many many dying trees.
Now with such a threat thrust upon the species, would it be wrong, to use these trees or let nature have it’s way and allow the forests to burn? Use trees for the lumber to build houses?
Fiber is an important aspect of the industry, and is not only found in trees, but in hemp plants, cloth, rugs. Chipboard, that has been the basis of the furniture you may use. An “antique piece” that was past down to you from your ancestors made of solid oak.
You know how Robert Laughlin speaks about “building blocks,” well, this aspect is part of discerning the micro structure, just as a theorist would consider how nature had been taken down to incredible perspectives, to only have meet a strange circumstance indeed?
An eye to the very structure of that hold together “the fabric” for the words we read in books. Who would have thought such matters supporting the concepts and ideas?
Would you have banned “particle research” if you knew the “anti-matter” had a diverse effect on nature? Does it?
If one was to focus solely on what is happen in the Canadian North then the views of the population would have been circumscribed to an area of discussion and would have not recognized the diversity of the countries like Sweden, Netherlands, China, and the many who are now producing plants for toilet paper, newspapers, magazines etc.
Some of the ways in which reforestation takes place is really interesting. Superior seedlings taken from the trees by baskets hanging from helicopters scoop the cones from the tops of superior trees. Superior Seedlings frozen, as pyramidal root sent as projectiles from aircraft and distributed over areas in need of reforestation.
I am reminded of the attempts of seedlings attributes once planned for the space shuttle. While silviculture is an important step to rejuvenation, it is the “rotation ages” of some trees that force people to recognize that forests will take some time to come back.
Some how to think that a part of the population of the planet should have been focused on, it would be a mistake not to think people did not care and have feelings for nature? What are we “projecting of ourselves?” People walk on the grass? People cut it? People add fertilizers.
Sorry if I had gone on to long.
The other question to ask is, have they decreased the frequency of their catalog mailings? Back in the ’90s I bought some things from them, and then I was getting a catalog at least twice a month. (This was before most catalogs were online, to be fair–but it’s not like the collections changed that much in two weeks!)
I finally figured out that the quality of the regular clothing was not so good and asked them to remove me from their mailing list. That reduced my impact on the forests. The next good thing that Victoria’s Secret could do is not send out so damn many catalogs. (And I also wonder whether their clothes are sweatshop-free, but that’s a different issue.)