Paper can be a sustainable materials choice, but our first step is to make sure we use it wisely with a systematic look at alternatives. For many years, we have used catalogs and flyers as an important tool for communicating with our members and prospective customers. Direct mail represents 60 percent of our total paper usage.

In order to measure and improve on the efficiency with which we use paper, we selected three key performance indicators:

• Co-op wide paper tons per sales dollar
• Direct mail paper tons per sales dollar
• The tons of virgin fiber per sales dollar

While the overall growth in our business may result in an increase in the absolute tons of paper we use, holding ourselves accountable to reducing the amount of paper per dollar is our way to measure paper efficiency.

Over the past few years we have undertaken many steps to improve our efficient use of direct mail including reducing our catalog page counts, increasing electronic communications with members and testing better papers such as lighter basis weight or increased recycled content. The result has been that we have achieved consistent year over year improvements in paper efficiency including an improvement by more than 15% from 2005 to 2006.

	2004	2005	% change	Estimated 2006	% change
Annual Sales (MM$)	$887	$1,022	15.2%	$1,182	15.6%
Total Paper (Tons)	N/A	N/A		6,491
Total paper Efficiency (MM Sales/ $/Ton)				0.18
Total Virgin Fiber (Tons) 26.6%				4,828
Virgin Fiber Efficiency (MM Sales $/Tons)			0.24
Direct Mail Catalog/Flyer Paper (Tons)	3508	3769	7.4%	3785	0.4%
Direct Mail Paper efficiency (MM Sales $/Ton)	0.25	0.27	7.2%	0.31	15.1%