Feb 06 2008
A Greener Shade of Mail
I saw the first episode of the new series called “Startup Junkies” a couple of weeks ago. It’s a reality/documentary show that details the lifecycle of a startup company, in this case a company called Earth Class Mail. Two cool ideas converge here— the series itself, which for those of us addicted to entrepreneurial ideas is great fun, and a creative idea for replacing the US Postal Service. That’s what I call an audacious goal.
I love the idea. Your mail, instead of being delivered to your doorstep, is delivered to a warehouse where it is scanned and an image of each item is sent to you by email. Then, you decide whether to 1) open it and look inside 2) have it sent directly to your doorstep 3) destroy/recycle it. This all happens electronically without you touching anything. It’s innovative, and it’s already working. CEO Ron Wiener has done this before—this is his fifth startup and he sounds like he knows what he’s doing.
The premise of Startup Junkies is that we get to see how he’s doing it. He and his team lived with a camera crew for an extended period of time, and that became an eight-episode television show. It’s somewhere between reality show and documentary, with a healthy dash of PR as a side benefit. It’s fast-paced and fun to watch—you can see it on Mojo TV or at http://www.mojohd.com/mojoseries/startupjunkies.
There’s some controversy over whether this is a “green” technology. I believe it is. It’s a productivity aid for people who travel or who just don’t want to spend time handling mail. It’s carbon saving in that it consolidates a fuel-intensive activity. (According to Earth Class Mail, the post office is one of the country’s largest consumers of energy.) Sure, there’s machinery, and there’s transportation involved. But compare that to the mail an average business sends to a landfill. How much space and how many employees are devoted to physical mail services in a very large business? Earth Class Mail has set a goal of recycling 200 tons of paper in 2008—which represents 90% of received mail. The average person today recycles about 20%, and I’ve seen statistics for businesses as low as 5%. It would be ideal if fewer pieces of mail were generated in the first place, and in time, that will happen. By then I suspect Ron Wiener will have another big idea.
While “Earth Class Mail” seems like a technological and “green” breakthrough in being “creative” and “audacious” in an attempt to replace the USPS, I think one should pause and look at this inane process:
Companies create “paper-based” marketing materials and allied “mail” and send it via the USPS — where it gets transferred to a special “high-tech” processing Earth Mail facility to be scanned and turned into electronic mail for transmission to the original addressee, thereby actually increasing the charges and time to get messages or ads circulated to the masses. If the USPS assigned prohibitively higher rates to irritating junk email in the first place, this Rube Goldberg process would not be necessary in the first place. The companies that use the USPS to support their nefarious schemes and “special offers” would just join the myriad of others that pollute the Internet — but individuals who do not welcome the “junk” mail in any form could just use their computer DELETE buttons, rather than pay a monthly fee to Earth Mail to effect the same result.