If you are as passionate about hardcopy mail as I am, then you may get riled up when you see articles or information being shared that claims hardcopy mail has a negative impact on the environment and that digital alternatives are much more “earth-friendly.” So how do you defend use of mail against those positions? Luckily, there are lots of resources out there which organizations can use to do so…

Let’s start with a reminder of why hardcopy mail is preferred by many businesses over its digital cousins. Put in simple terms, it works!

Speaking on behalf of nonprofit organizations who use the mail for raising funds, distributing publications, building membership, and communicating with members, donors, constituents, and lawmakers, direct mail continues to have a better response rate than digital alternatives. According to The Rome Group’s 2025 Philanthropic Landscape Survey, direct mail was one of the top three most effective fundraising strategies.

It’s not just nonprofit organizations that use direct mail because it works. According to Lob’s recent State of Direct Mail report, 90% of leaders increased their allocation to direct mail this year. According to Modern Postcard, “[d]irect mail is delivering exceptional results in 2025, with 161% ROI outperforming digital channels… Smart marketers are capitalizing on the physical mailbox as a high impact channel where messages receive focused attention and drive measurable business outcomes,” it said.

The USPS on its Delivers website provides articles and resources on the effectiveness of hardcopy direct mail. One such article recaps neuroscience research performed by Temple University (https://www.uspsdelivers.com/why-direct-mail-is-more-memorable/) that shows physical advertisements have a strong impact on consumer decision-making, are more memorable, and leave a more long-lasting impression than digital alternatives.

There are many more studies and articles on the neuroscience behind the success of direct mail. According to a study sponsored by Canada Post and conducted by Canadian firm, TrueImpact, “direct mail requires 21% less cognitive effort to process than digital media. This is because we are able to physically touch and feel the mail, which makes it easier for our brains to process the information. The study also found that participants who received direct mail spent 39% more time looking at it compared to email. This shows that physical mail captures our attention for longer periods of time, which is a valuable asset for any marketing campaign.”

A Royal Mail market research study, The Private Life of Mail, studied brain response using steady state topography and discovered that compared to email, hardcopy mail had 32% greater engagement, 22% greater emotional intensity, and 32% greater long-term memory encoding.

But Is It Green?

So, direct mail is great… but is it “green?” What about all that environmental mud-slinging about print and paper, direct mail included?

We need to counteract those attacks with some myth-busting. First, “[p]aper is one of the few products on earth that already has an environmentally sustainable, circular life cycle,” says Two Sides North America. “It is made from a renewable natural resource – trees that are purpose-grown, harvested and regrown in sustainably managed forests… It is manufactured using mostly renewable, carbon neutral bioenergy in a process that uses a lot of water, but consumes very little of it. And paper products are recycled more than any other material.”

Two Sides North America (https://twosidesna.org/) is part of a non-profit Two Sides global network that includes 600 member companies. Two Sides’ mission “is to dispel common environmental misconceptions and to inspire and inform businesses and consumers with engaging, factual information about the environmental sustainability and value of print, paper and paper-based packaging.” Two Sides provides great resources for businesses to use to defend their use of print & paper, including Fact Sheets (https://twosidesna.org/two-sides-fact-sheet) on topics such as environmental myths related to both paper and electronic communications.

The American Forest & Paper Association (https://www.afandpa.org/) shares information about the sustainability of paper and paper products. The association has an ambitious set of goals, Better Practices, Better Planet 2030: Sustainable Products for a Sustainable Future, to further advance the role the “industry plays in the circular economy.”

There are lots of great advocates and resources out there to defend the use of hardcopy mail over digital alternatives. There also are many third-party certification programs, such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification, to verify that products meet strict environmental, social, or ethical standards through independent, transparent audits.

What about the other players in the direct mail supply chain? Well, the USPS is a big piece of that supply chain and has many sustainability initiatives in place (https://about.usps.com/what/corporate-social-responsibility/sustainability/), including a USPS BlueEarth Carbon Accounting Service for business customers (https://about.usps.com/what/corporate-social-responsibility/sustainability/pdf/blue-earth-carbon-accounting-info-sheet.pdf) to determine how much of the USPS’ carbon emissions their mail is responsible for. As far as direct mail manufacturers and others in the supply chain responsible for producing and sending mail, there are additional corporate sustainability certification programs such as B Corp Certification, the Green Business Bureau, Carbon Neutral Certification, Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, and more!

Two Sides suggests that the reason why so many companies, government agencies, and media organizations are “encouraging us to ‘go green’ by switching from paper to electronic communications,” are “driven by the desire to cut costs, misguided marketing strategies, or both – not on sound science.” As noted above, paper is made with a renewable natural resource – trees that are purpose-grown, harvested and re-grown in sustainably managed forests.

“In contrast,” Two Sides reports, “electronic communication requires environmentally invasive drilling and mining for the finite raw materials needed to manufacture electronic devices and the massive server farms that support them. These devices and server farms are powered mostly by fossil fuel energy, and very few smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers get recycled.”

Under the heading of businesses pushing for electronic alternatives to mail to reduce costs, there currently is a piece of legislation being considered in the Senate that includes a provision that would allow regulatory documents that today are required to be sent hardcopy to be sent electronically if the legislation passes. A small provision in the larger INVEST Act (HR3883 / S1718), which was passed in the House late last year, and if passed in the Senate and enacted, it would have a significant negative impact on the postal system through rapid acceleration of First-Class Mail volume decline.

Kathleen J. Siviter is the Executive Director of the Alliance of Nonprofit Mailers (ANM) as well as President of Postal Consulting Services Inc. (PCSi), and she has over 30 years’ experience in the postal industry. She has worked for the U.S. Postal Service, Association for Postal Commerce (PostCom), National Association of Presort Mailers (NAPM) and others. She has also worked with PostalVision 2020, an initiative designed to engage stakeholders in discussions about the future of the American postal system.

This article originally appeared in the March/April, 2026 issue.