Sears Catalog Days Gone By

Every few months I receive a 600-page catalog from a company that I may have bought VHS video covers from, one time, 20 years ago. They’ve kept up with me through three moves. Impressive as their tenacity is, the waste of natural resources for something I don’t want is just simply, wasteful.

In 2009, a fourth grade class in Brookline, Massachusetts, also determined that catalogs were a problem. At their school they were receiving over 30 per day. Some weekly catalogs were addressed to teachers who had retired years earlier.

They held a Catalog-Canceling-Challenge among grades 3 to 5 to see which group of kids could cancel the most catalogs in 30 days. Some cancelled school catalogs, others canceled their parents' unwanted catalogs. Some went door-to-door in their neighborhoods offering to cancel neighbors' catalogs; several children canceled more than 100 each. After 30 days, 145 children in the three grades had opted out of 4,125 catalogs. If stacked, this would be a 30-foot-tall pile!

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the catalog industry mails out that many catalogs every six seconds. Nineteen billion catalogs are mailed per year. That's 50 million a day, and, assuming 11 catalogs per inch, that's enough to make a 70-mile-tall stack of catalogs—12 times the height of Mount Everest—each day.

One canceled catalog probably represents at least four future catalogs not showing up; these students saved 50 trees and 50,000 gallons of water. It takes 3 gallons to make the paper for one catalog. It also prevented the release of 6,000 pounds of carbon dioxide which is the annual emissions equivalent of a couple of cars.

The class participated in a live interview on NBC's Today Show. Other schools and Girl Scout troops joined the project—3,600 children in eight states canceled 22,000 catalogs. The project is still going on at schools across the country with a goal of cancelling 100,000 catalogs.

So, I did my part for today’s gift. I contacted the catalog company and unsubscribed from the mailing list. As a kid I loved the Sears and Penney’s catalog, but it just doesn’t make sense with the degradation of the environment and the availability of products online.

In Giving and Saving the Environment,

Robin