Hi,
One of the more irritating things I see is the piles of
unused Yellow and White pages that accumulate around my suburb. In
blocks of home units, up to half are never collected by residents, and
sit in sad, sodden piles near the letter boxes.
So I noticed with
interest that Sensis have been accredited as carbon neutral for their
YellowPages product:
http://about.sensis.com.au/sustainability/environment/our-commitmen....
One good aspect is that you can opt out from receivng this,
http://about.sensis.com.au/sustainability/environment/choosing-not-....
It
got me thinking about the meaning of 'Carbon Neutral'. I guess it is
not hard to achieve if you buy enough offsets. Yet this product relies on
consuming huge quantities of paper and distributing them to almost
every household in Australia, regardless of the actual demand or
usefulness of the product to the consumer.
I know that Sensis
revenues are down for this product, you can see the books getting
thinner each year. And they also have a good online offering. So ideally
it is something that will phase out over time. For me, if carbon
neutral was to have more credibility, a product like this should move
away from push marketing (you get it unelss you actively unsubscribe) to
pull marketing where only the people who really want it end up
receiving it. Same applies to local newpapers. But I am not sure if this
can ever happen while advertising rates are based mostly on
circulation, even though readership is usually a small fraction of this number.
