How do I make my mail more environmentally friendly?

Want to save a few trees? With the large volumes of mail moving around the world today, you could be forgiven for thinking that this was nothing but a process of consumption however, many mail organisations have been using recyclable paper for some time now.

But remember that environmental responsibility lies not just with the direct mail houses but also the transactional print outsourcing and corporate printing functions.

A recent press release from Royal Mail described incentives to reduce the environmentmental impact of mailings, the first set of measures related to sourcing of materials, the second to data based processes to suppress certain types of file.

So how do we go about doing this? Royal Mail listed some key measures:

• 95% of mail must be addressed accurately in compliance with Postal Address File
• Use of ‘Gone Away’, ‘Deceased’ suppression files
• Returned mail marked as ‘Gone Away’ to be added to internally managed and maintained suppression files.
• Use of Mailing Preference Service (MPS) files.
• Opt Out option within direct mail pieces.

Two measures to consider here. If you are composing the documents yourself then you can use your document composition tool to perform look ups to commercially available and internally developed files (in the case of returned mail). Some relatively simple logic will enable the suppression of the creation of documents.

If you are not composing the documents yourself and are receiving print ready files, you will need a tool that will allow you to look inside the print stream, verify what it finds with a data file and that can also make decisions based upon what it sees. This would be a print stream engineering tool.

95% PAF (Postal Address File) Compliant

This is CleanMail. This file is available at relatively low cost from a number of suppliers. Simply check each address against a look up file, if they don’t match rip out the original address and replace with the new address. You will also benefit from adding the CBC Barcode so that the Royal Mail can easily machine read your mail.

Use of Gone Away / Deceased.

Again, commercially available files exist. Perform the look up and eliminate any mail items that flag up in the look up file.

Mailing Preference Service

This file is readily available commercially. A straight forward look up procedure.

Return Mail

This really depends upon how much Return Mail you get. Just build a simple Access database and enter the data manually if the volume is very low. If the volume is higher, then it might be sensible to invest in an inbound scanning system (or look at using internal mail sortation machines) that can read the envelopes and automatically write to a file. You can permanently delete the records from the mail.

When you perform a mail run, simply present this database file to the composition or print stream engineering solution and extract those mail pieces directly from the mail run.

With a good Automated Document Factory control system, this would all be audited automatically but you should implement some form of audit process yourselves.

Consumer Opt out

This process is likely to require attention both in the call centre and in the mail room. The call centre must to equipped to respond to mail opt out requests and to update a database suppression file. It would probably also be a good idea if this event triggered a letter notifiction to the consumer who opted out.

The mail room may again need a scanner driven process to quickly record and update the databases. It may also need to estalish a simple job for consumer notification.

Good luck with this and if you have any questions, get in touch!