Yolanda Noble, PrintWeek, 01 August 2008

Plans to regulate the direct mail industry through the new PAS 2020 standard don’t seem to have been thought through, particularly the move to outlaw the use of polywrapping and poly-bagging.

According to the Royal Mail, around 1.9 billion items were sent plastic-wrapped last year, accounting for 12% of the total post. If these, as well as an estimated 900 million weekend newspapers that are wrapped each year, were to be wrapped in paper as has been suggested there would be a huge hike in the demand on paper stocks.

Yolanda Noble is chief executive of communication, print and direct mail specialist Dsicmm

The average British household is bombarded by 650 items of junk mail every year and the UK consumes four times more paper per person than the world average. Paper production damages forests, pollutes water and in doing so helps disrupt the climate.

http://www.shrinkpaper.org/ Read The True Cost of Paper by Mandy Haggith

Despite the economic times, consumers and the media are still being tough on brands or government departments that do business while ignoring the environmental impact.

Our service also helps you comply with BSI Standard PAS2020, new EU directives on landfill, and addresses the issue of ‘producer responsibility’ in that all waste paper generated is disposed of properly. 80% of the carbon footprint for a piece of mail is in this ‘end of life’ solution.

Nearly 100 million pieces of direct mail are sent to the wrong address each year costing more than £80 million.*

Fraud is does not care which way the economy is going and already up 25% this year. This is the time that people should be strengthening their defences against fraud, it is costing the UK around £50 billion a year.  Sending mail to the wrong address is one way that fraudsters get access the first pieces of data which may lead to identity fraud.

Our service can help mitigate the problem of potential fraud.

Veridata now offers an encrypted 2d bar-coding system called CodEffect which means that capture of name & address, campaign codes etc. is considerably cheaper and enables us to offer our customers great savings for processing their returned mail.

CodEffect capture solution offer a fixed charge, regardless of the amount of data captured.

The CodEffect service has two distinct elements – simple data capture from returns and data verification & enhancement.