I recently received an email from a publicist with a small note below the signature: Save a tree, it said. Please donât print this email unless absolutely necessary.
LOL, I thought to myself. Why would I print an email promoting a sustainable pee funnel? Why would I print any email? Her note seemed like a relic from the early 2000s, when we werenât yet used to reading everything on screens and people still owned printers. Now, however, most of us write on paper so rarely that our hands start to cramp up when weâre signing checks.
While this may be good for trees, the rise of the internet has been terrible for the paper industry. Per capita use of paper in the U.S. has fallen 46 percent over the past 15 years. But now, Big Paper is trying to make a comeback.
Marketplace reports the Paper and Packaging Board, the paper industryâs trade group, will spend $170 million on a campaign to get you back on paper. And theyâre reaching for your heartstrings:
âWhat we really want to do with this campaign is reinforce how our products connect people with whatâs important in their life [sic] â whether itâs connections with people, whether itâs getting their personal goals accomplished,â says Executive Director Mary Anne Hansan.
Thatâs the premise of the campaignâs first commercial, called âLetters to Dad.â It features a young boy who writes to his father overseas via paper airplanes. He then sails them across his backyard fence. While he hopes theyâre getting to dad, the next-door neighbor collects them.
Then, one day, the paper airplanes suddenly fly back into the boyâs yard. This time, though, they carry his fatherâs responses.
Awwwww. How sweet. Itâs almost enough to make you start printing emails.
